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MORE AUTHORS 
AND I 






BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

The Enchanted Stone 
Life's Little Things 
Life's Lesser Moods 
Adventures Among Pictures 
Days with Velasquez 
Days in Cornwall 
Augustus Saint Gaudens 
The Education of an Artist 
The Diary of a Looker-on 
Turner's Golden Visions 
Rembrandt 

The Post Impressionists 
Brabazon : His Art and Life 
The Consolations of a Critic 
The Soldier Boy 
The Invisible Guide 
What's Freedom ? 
Things Seen in America 
Art and I 
Authors and I 
Etc., Etc. 



MORE AUTHORS 

AND I ' * * 

By C. LEWIS HIND 



NEW YORK 
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 

1922 



-p 



em 

PnfcHsher 



Printed in Great Britain by R. Clay & Sens, Ltd., Bungay, Suffolk 



TO THE READER 

HERE they are, my fifty Men and Women 
Authors, arranged alphabetically, from Ade 
(George) to Zangwill (Israel). If, reader, 
you find some of your favourites omitted, please 
remember that there was a former book called 
Authors and I. This new volume, most of which 
was written in America, is named, naturally, More 
Authors and I. For I was allowed to acquire 
the habit of writing these studies, week by 
week, for The Christian Science Monitor, and as 
Mr. Frederick Dixon, then Editor of that excellent 
journal, liked them, and after Authors and I was 
published said encouragingly, " Carry on," I con- 
tinued to write about the authors to whom I 
reacted, for some reason or another, at the moment, 
even such far-away figures as George Eliot and 
Herbert Spencer. And I am doing it still. For 
authors (and their vicissitudes) are many and 
persistent, and new ways of regarding them open 
unceasingly, like new dawns. 

C. L. H. 
Spring, 1922. 



CONTENTS 



GEORGE ADE . 

J kMEJ LANE ALLEN . 

U F. ANSTEY " . 

WILLIAM ARCHER 
BLRNHARD BERENSON 

6. ROBERT BRIDGES 

7. EUGENE BRIEUX 

8. A. II. BULLEN . 

9. FRANCES HODGSON BURNEI 

10. JOHN BURROUGHS 

11. BLISS CARMAN . 

12. R. B. CUNNINGHAME-GRAH 
JOHN DAVIDSON 
GEORGE ELIOT . 



ST. JOHN G. ERVINE . 
" MICHAEL FAIRLESS " 



13; 
14. 

«5- 

16. 

17. ANATOLE FRANCE 

18. SIR JAMES GEORGE FRAZER 

19. HAROLD FREDERIC 

20. W. L. GEORGE . 

21. SIR PHILIP GIBBS 

22. GEORGE GISSING 

23. JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS 

24. \\. II. HUDSON 

25. A. S. M. HUTCHINSON 

26. FORD MADOX HUEFFER 



1 A<.r 

3 
9 

'4 
20 

*7 

54 

40 

47 
53 
58 
65 

7i 
77 
83 
89 

95 
101 

107 

113 
118 
124 

129 

*35 
Mi 

m 
152 



i 



Vlll 



Contents 



27. 


JAMES GIBBONS HUNEKER . 












159 


28. 
29. 


VICENTE BLASCO IbAnEZ . 
W. W. JACOBS 












165 

170 


30. 


LIONEL JOHNSON 












174 


31. 


STEPHEN LEACOCK 












180 


32. 


SINCLAIR LEWIS 












186 


33- 


AMY LOWELL . 












193 


34- 


ARTHUR MACHEN 












199 


35- 


WALTER DE LA MARE 












205 


36. 


CHARLES MARRIOTT . 












211 


37- 


H. B. MARRIOTT- WATS ON 












217 


38. 


HERMAN MELVILLE . 












223 


39- 


ALFRED NOYES 












229 


40. 


BARRY PAIN 












235 


4 1 - 


COVENTRY PATMORE . 












. 240 


42. 


G. W. RUSSELL (a. E.) 












247 


43- 


CLEMENT SCOTT 












253 


44- 


SIR OWEN SEAMAN . 












260 


45- 


HERBERT SPENCER 












. 266 


46. 


GEORGE W. STEEVENS 












• 273 


47- 


J. M. SYNGE . 












. 279 


48. 


SIR RABINDRANATH TAGORI 












. 285 


49- 


A. B. WALKLEY 












292 


50. 


ISRAEL ZANGWILL 












. 298 



MORE AUTHORS AND I 



I. GEORGE ADE 

GEORGE ADE is an American humorist. 
I make this definite statement because 
he is one by intention and by confession. It 
is a new kind of humour to me : it is a humour that 
is calculated, pursued, not genial, not kindly, rather 
satirical, rather contemptuous, but it raises laughs. 

At the dinner given by the Lotos Club of New 
York to George Ade I was able to examine the 
technique of his humour. He made a long speech 
in response to the praises that had been lavished 
upon him ; and it was clear that his method is — 
every sentence must arouse a laugh. It became 
almost automatic. If the laugh did not come 
immediately he reached a full stop, he would pause 
the fraction of a second. The laugh always followed. 

In one of the reports of this dinner the writer 
remarked, " Mr. Ade gave away a lot of expensive 
humour." I suppose that is so. The best humor- 
ists with whom I am acquainted so bubble with 
humour that they cannot help expressing it even 
when they are catching a train, or looking for a 
collar stud ; but it does not seem to come naturally 
to Mr. George Ade and his kind. He looked quite 
serious at the dinner. He might have been a 
statesman or the president of a bank. 

I cannot help thinking that his humour is manu- 
factured, and he, being a very intelligent and 

3 



4 More Authors and I 

experienced man, who knows his public, and the 
kind of thing that makes them laugh, can produce 
a laugh-creating sentence at will. The sally that 
aroused the loudest laugh in his after-dinner speech 
was : " I built my country place in Indiana, not 
to live in — merely to refer to." 

Mr. Ade rose to affluence and fame on the Fable. 
For twenty years he has been trying, so he says, to 
escape from it. But he cannot. The American 
public wants from him Fables, as it wanted puns 
from Tom Hood, and marble from Alma Tadema, 
as it wants serenity from Mr. Harding, and Home 
Runs from Babe Ruth. The public knows exactly 
what it wants. 

I count myself fortunate that I came upon Mr. 
George Ade's method of humour without knowledge 
of it, and without prejudice. A year ago he was 
little more than a name to me. If anybody had 
asked me what I knew about him, I should have 
answered : " A humorist of the west : one of those 
who have helped to make Chicago the ' literary ' 
capital of the United States of America : an adept 
in slang, who drives his points home with Capital 
Letters." 

One day, on a railway journey, I bought a copy 
of an American magazine with a million or so 
circulation. I looked it through, sampled it, found 
the advertisements more interesting than the text, 
and reminded myself what a large number of essays, 
stories and poems there are in the world that I 
do not want to read. Toward the end of the 
magazine I found a page of Fables by George Ade. 
This was a discovery, I read the Fables with 



George Ade 5 

delight, finding in them a new method of literary- 
expression ; and although I did not know the 
meaning of all the slang words that this hard- 
headed, hard-seeing author employed, yet I felt 
that these Fables gave distinction to the magazine. 
The author had something to say. 

I tore the pages out, intending to preserve them 
for the Portfolio I have kept for twenty years 
labelled, " The Best Things in Current Writing." 
And while doing so I decided that I would place 
them beside Crosland's Fables, which appeared in 
the Academy and elsewhere about 1900. The 
difference seems to be that Ade deals with Chicago, 
Crosland with Life. 

I hope Mr. Ade will not call me an Elderly 
Grouch when I inform him that I have never been 
able to recapture the entertainment and the sense 
of novelty with which I read his Fables for the 
first time. The trick of them now seems obvious, 
the philosophy bitter, the slang forced. But they 
go on. The public is used to liking them. In 
volume form they have taken many names, Fables 
in Slang (the first), More Fables, Ade's Fables, 
Hand-made Fables. The last mentioned I bought, 
read through, and in conversation made the mistake 
of calling it " Machine-Made Fables." They have 
now grown very long. Crosland, like ^Esop, would 
sometimes say his say in a few lines. Ade sometimes 
requires several pages, and although I am interested 
in the mechanics of them, I do not laugh as the 
fable unfolds. His machine runs very well : the 
object of a machine is to be efficient, not to express 
pathos, pity, or whimsicality. I still call his latest 



6 More Authors and I 

book " Machine-Made Fables." I wonder what 
Mr. Ade thinks of Barrie or Max Beerbohm. 
Modern American humour, as expressed by Mr. 
Ade, is rather hard. Compassion does not enter 
into it. It is metallic. 

Am I wrong at not being amused I Ought I to 
laugh at this, a typical passage ? 

" The Peanut-Parlour of Pseudo-Art instead of 
popping like a Toy Balloon, according to Prediction, 
had absorbed a Gents' Furnishing Emporium and 
was blossoming out with a Double Front rivalling 
the Architectural Splendours of the Taj Mahal." 

Or this — 

" In a vast majority of cases she has not the 
Looks to back up the Title. Even the Buckingham 
Palace manner and the Arctic Front cannot buffalo 
the idle Spectator into overlooking the fact that 
she belongs to the genus Quince." 

Perhaps I am wrong in not being amused because 
the publisher's statement on the jacket of Hand- 
Made Fables says : " Every story has a bright and 
shining point upon which some human foible of 
ours is transfixed. But it is irony that pricks with- 
out wounding, which recognizes that being sarcastic 
is a very human foible itself. Of course, it proves 
again that Slang is a fine art, and that humour 
distinctly belongs to American literature." 

La ! La ! 

But although Fables made Mr. Ade famous, and 
are his chief contribution to the literature of our 
day, he has gambolled in other fields. He has 
written a number of facetious books under such 
titles as Artie, Knocking the Neighbours, and he has 



George Ade 7 

been a most successful writer of musical comedies, 
and such-like things that run a year, and that give 
the " frivolous playgoer " snappy sentences to 
remember and to quote. I am informed that " I 
feel like thirty cents " comes from the George Ade 
mint. 

It is curious that the two expressions of Mr. 
George Ade's abounding talent that have most 
interested me are my first encounter with him and 
my latest. The first was that reading of his Fables 
when they were quite new to me : the latest was 
his autobiography, published not long ago in the 
million or so circulation magazine that has taken 
him under its wing. The very title of this auto- 
biography made me smile. It is called They Simply 
Wouldn't Let Me Be a High-Brow. To that is 
added this sub-title — " Those ' Fables in Slang ' 
which I began to write twenty years ago started 
me upward on my dissolute career and landed me 
in the gutter of notoriety." 

It is a most humorous autobiography, and, as a 
contribution to a History of Journalism in Chicago, 
most valuable. It is a romance of " getting on." 
For a long time Mr. Ade had been writing a column 
called " Stories of the Streets, and of the Town," 
and after ten years of " clanking toil " had worked 
his way to a salary of 60 dollars a week. One 
morning he said to himself — " Why not a Fable for 
a change ? And instead of slavishly copying iEsop 
and La Fontaine, why not retain the archaic form 
and the stilted manner of composition and, for 
purposes of novelty, permit the language to be ' fly,' 
modern, undignified, quite up-to-the-moment ? " 



8 More Authors and I 

The Fable was written. It was about Sister 
Mae and her sister Luella, " whose Features did 
not seem to know the value of Team Work." It 
caught on. It clung on. More followed, and Ade 
fell into the arms of " the wizard who sold syndicate 
features to the daily press." Soon he was getting 
800 dollars a week and later " passed the thousand 
mark." 

" Can you beat it ? " 

America is a great country. Such a thing never 
happened to George Meredith or Thomas Hardy. 

And yet, throughout this delightful Autobio- 
graphy, which is perhaps the best thing George 
Ade has written, there is a note of wistfulness, or 
regret. He harps on the Great American Novel : 
he hints playfully that had he not been so Tre- 
mendously Successful in a Side Show : had not the 
Syndicate Wizard been so clamorous for More 
Fables he might have — 

Who knows ? 

There may be more than meets the eye in that 
title — They Simply Wouldn't Let Me Be a High- 
Brow. 

When I said to my neighbour at the Lotos Club 
dinner : " Why did they give this signal honour to 
George Ade ? " he did not answer, but turned to 
his companion and asked, " Why is George Ade our 
guest of honour ? " Another pause. Then a man 
behind, who had overheard the questions, replied, 
" Because he's George Ade." 

Literary Fame is a queer Jade. Lord Dunsany 
has written a little play about Her. 



II. JAMES LANE ALLEN 

IT is no reproach to an author to find himself in 
the ten-cent, or even in the five-cent box. 
This fate happens to all. Libraries are dis- 
persed, an unbookish man inherits the family 
volumes, folk move to another town ; then the 
second-hand book dealer, in an untidy suit and with 
benevolent eyes, makes a ruthless and absurd offer 
for the lot, and is ready with his sack or his cart. 

However I may be hurried, I can rarely with- 
stand the temptation of the ten-cent box. Some- 
times it is a sad experience. No one likes to see his 
friends drop down in the world, through no fault 
of their own, but through the chances and changes 
of life. Such an experience I had in New York, 
when, on my way to see a sunset from Staten Island, 
I missed an Elevated or two, because I paused to 
look through a ten-cent box which I had not inves- 
tigated recently. In the box I found The Choir 
Invisible and The Heroine in Bronze by James Lane 
Allen. 

While the Elevated ground down to South Ferry, 
and while the steamer glided across the bay, I dipped 
into The Choir Invisible and recaptured much of 
the rapture with which I read it, so long ago as 
1897. What a charming story it is, so sane, so 
wholesome, so full of a kind of interior beauty and 
high-mindedness ; and what a happy picture it 






io More Authors and I 

gives of life in Kentucky nearly a century and a 
quarter ago. I remembered the beginning — " The 
middle of a fragrant afternoon of May in the green 
wilderness of Kentucky : the year 1795." 

I remembered, too, that when The Choir In- 
visible reached London in 1897, I reviewed it with 
fervour, and I almost started from my seat on the 
Staten Island boat, when I read, in the publishers' 
advertisements at the end of the book, an extract 
from the review that I wrote in 1897. Here it is : 
" A book to read, and a book to keep after reading. 
Mr. Allen's gifts are many — a style pellucid and 
picturesque, a vivid and disciplined power of 
characterization, and an intimate knowledge of a 
striking epoch and an alluring country." Since 
those days The Choir Invisible has done well — very 
well. In 1 901 it was in its 223rd thousand. Every- 
body who reads has read it, and enjoyed it. 

Having renewed acquaintance, so pleasurable, 
with Amy, and Mrs. Falconer, and John Gray, and 
John Gray II, I turned to the other book by James 
Lane Allen that I had picked from the ten-cent 
box — The Heroine in Bronz,e. What a disappoint- 
ment ! It did not hold me at all ; it did not 
interest me, and when I turned the pages and found 
this sentence — "And now, before the Shears of 
Silence clip the threads which have woven this 
piece of life's tapestry and are near the margin of 
the canvas, etc., etc.," I put down the book and 
said — I'll read no more. 

This book does not come off. It is sentimental ; 
the writing is too fine, overlaboured, and the 
characters are idealizations ; they are not drawn 



James Lane Allen n 

from life. Mr. Allen is a man of ripe sentiment, 
prone to fine writing, and with a tendency some- 
times to think that he is standing in a pulpit, not 
sitting at a desk. He, like everybody else, has the 
defects of his qualities. In The Choir Invisible he 
held his defects well in hand, and he was controlled 
by his deep-seated affection for his beloved Kentucky ; 
but in The Heroine in Bronze (it was written fifteen 
years afterwards) he wandered away from life into a 
kind of sentimental dreamland, which no doubt he 
felt to be real enough, but of whose reality he has 
not been able to convince at least one reader. 

Then I thought of The Kentucky Cardinal, one 
of his earlier books, and said, That surely is in the 
class of The Choir Invisible, because in it he deals 
with Kentucky, and when his native state is his 
theme he is at his best. I recalled it (my copy 
has delightful illustrations by Hugh Thomson) and 
remembered the book with pleasure ; remembered 
also the ripe humour that runs through it, in the 
style of, but less sophisticated and more mature 
than, The Dolly Dialogues. And there was the 
sequel called Aftermath, in which sentiment quite 
gets the upper hand, and which allows the author, 
at the end, to indulge in the luxury of grief. 

While I was watching the sunset from a hill in 
Staten Island, and the ships passing to and fro in 
the Narrows, I reflected how the fashions in literature 
change, and wondered if people still read this 
serene, uplifting and lovable writer, who has seen 
new generations of authors rise up and catch the 
public ; and who, in the passage of years, has 
become more of a preacher, which is quite natural, 



12 More Authors and I 

and less a teller of stones with a meaning. He was 
never wholly a novelist : he has always had some- 
thing to say which is more important than the 
vicissitudes of the relations between men and 
women. 

I am sure that he is at his best when dealing with 
Kentucky, and my investigations, when I returned 
home and went through his books, fully confirmed 
this. That comedy in letters, an outside of Ken- 
tucky volume, which he calls The Emblems of Fidelity, 
is well done, but it is too remote : this outpouring 
of a literary and well-stored mind, with a turn for 
humour, is of the study and the brooding scholar. 
So is The Bride of the Mistletoe and its successors. 
These books glide too easily, and as for The White 
Cowl, which someone has extravagantly called " the 
finest short story in American fiction," I find it 
merely insipid. 

Of the Kentucky books I like also The Reign of 
Law, in which he actually makes the story of hemp 
fascinating ; but for interest give me The Kentucky 
Warbler. That is a book to remember, a book of 
place, a book that sings of nature. And there is 
the volume called The Blue-Grass Region of Ken- 
tucky, and Other Kentucky Papers. If I were 
asked to choose three representative books by 
James Lane Allen I should select those loving and 
informing Kentucky Papers, The Choir Invisible, 
and The Kentucky Warbler ; and could I resist 
adding a fourth, A Kentucky Cardinal ? 

From an interview with James Lane Allen by 
Isaac Marcosson I learn that most of his books 
were written in New York hotels. When his 



James Lane Allen 13 

friend expressed surprise at this he answered, " The 
question is often asked, how can a man in a city 
write of a country far away that he has not seen for 
years ? But that country is never far away and 
the man looks over into it unceasingly. He has 
but to lift his eyes to see it — as clearly as he does 
the people in the street." 

To all men their home and their homeland are 
so stamped on memory that no after experiences, 
however vivid and varied, can efface them. It has 
long been my idea that the social, yes, and religious 
and political history of America, can best be told 
by taking each state as an entity ; and I am glad 
to find that Mr. Allen has this feeling also. It is 
his opinion that, " The serial of the nation must be 
told in terms of its states. Each of these states is 
a little entity all its own. Together the story of 
their lives and individualities comprises the larger 
narrative of the country." 

From this consideration of the literary work of 
James Lane Allen it should not be difficult to sum 
up, in a sentence, his contribution to the history 
of his time. Let me try. How will this do ? — 
" He gave romance and reality to Kentucky/ ' 

Even in the ten-cent box I see and scent the 
blue-grass region of his waking dreams. 



III. "F. ANSTEY" 

AUTHORS may be divided into four classes : 
those who are eternally successful ; those 
who are very successful for a time ; those 
who have a spasmodic spurt of success, and those 
who never have any success at all. 

" F. Anstey," or, to give him his correct patro- 
nymic, Thomas Anstey Guthrie, is in the second 
class. He was very successful for a time. Vice 
Versa, his first attempt at authorship, published in 
1882, when he was twenty-six, was prodigiously 
successful. So was Voces Populi, issued in 1892. 
He has published many other books, but in the 
ideal library, which I sometimes have in mind, 
these are the two that I should select to represent 
" F. Anstey." 

Careful librarians insert the word Guthrie after 
Anstey on the title-page. When he published 
Vice Versa, he had been lately called to the bar, 
and I suppose he concealed his real name lest liti- 
gants should think that a humorist is not the 
proper person to win a lawsuit. But he need not 
have worried : he soon gave up the bar, commenced 
author, and joined the staff of Punch. 

When I wrote that " F. Anstey " belongs to the 
" very successful for a time class " I was not for- 
getting his contributions to Punch. There for years 
he was continuously successful. The humorous 

14 



u F. Anstey" 15 

articles signed " F. A." have been read by thousands, 
by generations, for Punch readers are faithful, and 
they drop into the way of regarding a favourite 
humorist as an inevitable humorist, and laughing 
regularly. As George Grossmith once said : " They 
laugh as often when I do serious things as when I 
do funny things." 

But in spite of " F. Anstey's " contributions to 
Punch, and the fact that he published a book in 
191 5 called In Brief Authority (it escaped my 
notice), it seems a long time ago since he flourished : 
since the days when everyone was talking about 
Vice Versa, The Tinted Venus, The Pocket Ibsen, 
The Travelling Companions, Voces Populi and The 
Man from Blankleys\ which was made into a most 
amusing play. How does " F. Anstey " stand 
to-day ? 

Two courses are open to me when I wish to 
discover how the present generation is receiving an 
author who was once very successful. I talk with 
the girl librarians at my favourite New York Branch 
Public Library, and I consult Mr. Smiles, the most 
affable bookseller in Manhattan, who has every author 
of any kind of reputation catalogued in his mind. 

There are nearly twenty " F. Ansteys " on the 
shelf at the Branch Public Library, but the cards 
pasted within the covers show that the demand for 
them is not brisk. Vice Versa has had many 
readers since 191 7, but Voces Populi does not seem 
to attract the New York public. 

When I consulted Mr. Smiles about " F. An- 
stey's " popularity he was inclined to be uninterested. 
Mr. Smiles is actual, or, as he expresses it, " up-to- 



1 6 More Authors and I 

date," But he thought he might have a copy of 
Vice Versa. 

" Humorous," he remarked, putting his ringers 
to his brow in the attitude of remembrance, " very 
good humour." 

" Yes," I replied, " very good eighties humour. 
An enthusiastic notice in the Saturday Review 
made Vice Versa famous. If you can disentangle 
a copy from your shelves I suspect that you 
will find the pith of that review quoted in the 
advertisements at the end." 

Mr. Smiles found the volume, somewhat shop- 
stained, and this is what we read — 

" The Saturday Review says : ' If ever there 
was a book made up from beginning to end of 
laughter, and yet not a comic book, or a " merry " 
book, or a book of jokes, or a book of pictures, or a 
jest book, or a tomfool book, but a perfectly sober 
and serious book in the reading of which a sober 
man may laugh from beginning to end, it is a book 
called Vice Versa : or a Lesson to Fathers. . . . 
We close the book, recommending it very earnestly 
to all fathers in the first instance, and their sons, 
nephews, uncles, and male cousins next.' " 

Mr. Smiles rubbed his hands. " That's the kind 
of review we booksellers want," he said. " I wish 
American reviewers were more appreciative, more 
— er — excited. They seem afraid to praise. Ah, 
' F. Anstey ' is now a back number." 

" Come, come, Mr. Smiles," I said. " If you 
can't sell an author that doesn't show that he's a 
back number. How about Voces Populi ? " 

Mr. Smiles reflected a moment. " Was it not a 



" F. Am fey" 17 

biggish, square book with a lot of italic type in it 
and illustrations by Bernard Partridge ? " 

I smiled and nodded, smiled because Mr. Smiles 
is so true a bookseller : he remembers a book by 
its size and look, and the artist who illustrated it. 
" Did you ever meet Mr. Anstey Guthrie," he asked 
suddenly. 

It was curious that Mr. Smiles should have 
addressed this question to me, because I was at 
that moment recalling a walk I had once with 
" F. Anstey." 

" I met him, Mr. Smiles, at a dinner-party in 
Kensington given by a publisher in the early 
nineties. Those were the days when the humorous, 
dialogue story was popular, and the conversation 
that evening turned on this lively form of literary 
journalism. 'F. Anstey' was making a hit with 
them in Punch, and Pett Ridge was also amusing 
us with his humorous dialogue stories in the St. 
James's Gazette and the Pall Mall Budget. He 
took Anstey as a model, I suppose, but his dialogues 
were not copies : indeed Pett Ridge had a richer 
humour, and riper sentiment, and sympathy for his 
Cockney creations. Opposite me at the publisher's 
dinner-table was a short, fresh-coloured youngish 
man, rather silent ; indeed, I don't remember that 
he spoke at all. But his was an intelligent silence. 
His eyes twinkled behind his glasses, and his quick 
movements of attention were often more eloquent 
than words. Well, the dinner and the after talk 
passed as usual, and when hat and coat time came I 
found that the silent, amused man and I were going 
in the same direction. I beguiled the way by 



1 8 More Authors and I 

continuing the humorous dialogue-story talk that 
had cheered the dinner-time, and spoke freely of 
the merits and demerits of the method, illustrating 
my argument by criticizing the examples that were 
appearing in Punch, My companion helped me 
to talk, fed me with a spoon as it were. When we 
parted I felt that I had been saying too much, but 
rather neatly, and to the point." 

Mr. Smiles shouted with laughter. " Your un- 
known companion was the author of Voces Populi. 
Ha! ha!" 

" That was so," I answered. " I discovered it 
later from our host, the publisher." 

As Mr. Smiles's shop happened to be free of 
customers I removed a pile of The Outline of History 
from a stool, and seating myself said, " You might 
find it interesting, Mr. Smiles, to make a study of 
the technique of the Anstey dialogue-stories in such 
collections as Voces Populi and The Travelling Com- 
panions. It is an amusing form, and in the hands 
of a master like ' F. Anstey ' is very readable, but 
I think it is more welcome as a sip in weekly pub- 
lications than as a deep draught in a book. Study 
' At a Dinner Party ' in Voces Populi, Mr. Smiles, 
and you will get the Anstey method to a T. His 
long books are a different matter. Vice Versa and 
The Giants Robe are based on Ideas, and Ideas as 
you know, Mr. Smiles, are rare. Vice Versa is 
really an unforgettable book. Why don't they 
include it in ' The Modern Library ' ? " 

" Ah," said Mr. Smiles, shrugging his shoulders : 
that " Ah " meant, " I am only a bookseller, 
but " 



" F. Anstey " 19 

To be quite sure of the standing of " F. Ansi 
I called at a palatial book establishment on Fifth 
Avenue and asked if they had any books by " F. 
Anstey." The manager (I always call him that) 
reflected, " Anstey, Anstey ! Ah, his Vice Versa 
had a large sale many years ago, and I seem to 
remember some call for his what was it ? — Baboo, 
Bayard from Bengal or something like that." 

The manager addressed himself to the telephone, 
calling up, I presume, the vast, dim chambers 
where books are stored. Then, turning to me he 
said, " We have nothing of ' F. Anstey's ' in stock." 

Some authors are very successful for a time. 

Later. — When I returned to London I had the 
good fortune to meet " F. Anstey " again. He no 
longer writes : he now devotes himself to art, his 
old love. 



IV. WILLIAM ARCHER 

WE met again in New York and talked of old 
days and old friends ; and of new days, 
new movements and new plays. Also of 
his play. 

He told me, in strict confidence, the title : that 
he had come to New York to discuss the play with 
Winthrop Ames, and that he would return to 
America in the autumn for the premiere. " And 
remember," he said, " that it isn't laid in India, 
but in an imaginary country beyond the Himalayas." 

I promised to remember. A pause while I 
watched this tall, sturdy, book-and-lamp Viking. 

Recalling that he had made a study of the Negro 
problem and written a book on it called Through 
Afro-America, I told him of the latest development 
— the proposed return of the Negro to Africa. He 
smiled ; but I saw that he was not interested. 

" That was a good book of yours, Archer," I said, 
" on Poets of the Younger Generation. What I 
liked about it was the absence of emotionalism, or 
ecstasy. You examined these young poets as you 
examine the Negro, or Ibsen, or a play by Shaw, or 
Mr. H. G. Wells' idea of the Deity, or a National 
Theatre : you bring to anything you study the 
rugged detachment of your Scandinavian ancestry." 

" I'm not a Scandinavian. I'm pure Scotch, 
born at Perth, I have lots of relations by marriage 

20 



William Archer 21 

in Norway, and I know the country, but I am not 
I Scandinavian. My father was of Queensland, 
Australia." 

k4 You have also translated Ibsen, have you not ? " 

Being a Scotchman, he smiled, and I, to recall 
the conversation to a becoming seriousness, said, 
l< Have you seen Drinkwater's Lincoln ? " 

His reply interested and delighted me. This 
veteran who has seen every play of importance since 
1879, when he became dramatic critic of the London 
Figaro, and has written about most of them, said, 
I It impressed me as much (I think he said more) 
than any play I have ever seen. The New York 
performance is much better than the London 
presentation." 

A further pause. " This is rather like a ' Real 
Conversation,' " I said. " Another of your books 
that I liked was that called Real Conversations. 
You gave a new form to the Interview and I wonder 
that it has not been adopted oftener. George 
Moore's Conversations with Edmund Gosse were 
rather Georgemooreish. I fancy he introduced a 
good deal into Mr. Gosse's mouth. Now I am 
quite sure that all your Conversations were authentic 
reports. No one would suspect W. A. of inventing 
or indulging in any kind of whimsicality in a t Real 
Conversation.' " He looked as if he agreed with 
me ; but he made no answer. Another pause. 

" What have you been doing since I last saw you 
— when was it, in 191 5 ? " 

" During the war I did war work. I was 
appointed to the Ministry of Information. There 
I wrote pamphlets and articles and a small book, 



22 More Authors and I 

you know it — Gems of German thought. I had 
another war book ready, but the armistice made it 
unnecessary." 

" And since ? " 

There was no need to ask that question. Relieved 
of war work he turned with zest to an enterprise 
to which all dramatic critics, I believe, secretly 
aspire. He wrote a play. His thoughts are full of 
it. It was his interest in this play that made him 
rather indifferent to my comments on the excellent 
books he has written. Long ago he proposed to 
write a play with Bernard Shaw. That was 
Widowers' Houses ; but " Shaw took the bit be- 
tween his teeth, and made it all his own." The 
new Archer play was to have been in collaboration 
with Bernard Shaw, but this time, I gather that 
Mr. Archer took the bit between his teeth. He 
wrote a scenario so full and complete, that Shaw 
said, " It is mere laziness to ask me to collaborate 
with you." 

" I hope that your play will have as great a success 
as Lightnin\" I said. 

He gravely acquiesced, and departed to keep an 
appointment with Winthrop Ames. 

When this Scotsman, who translated and intro- 
duced Ibsen to England, had gone I opened his 
Playmaking : a Manual of Craftsmanship, and spent 
an hour with that clear-sighted, logical, informative 
volume. Archer's prose proceeds the way Ibsen's 
characters talk. The characters say exactly what 
they mean, and the listener absorbs the meaning 
exactly. So with Archer's prose. He thinks before 
he writes ; he is never in a hurry, never lyrical or 



William Archer 23 

rhetorical, and the even beat of his sentences and 
clauses express the even beat of his thought and 
judgment. If a Rolls-Royce engine could speak I 
suppose that it would converse in the way that 
Mr. Archer writes. But he also has a restricted 
Scotch humour, not flaunting, but apparent to the 
perceptive. This treatise on Playmaking begins — 
" There are no rules for writing a play." As to 
his more explicit humour I have seen ironical verses 
by him, not as good as W. S. Gilbert, but better 
than I could write. 

He is very serious in his writing, and quite 
scholarly and painstaking. I am now going to 
quote a passage from Playmaking. It is rather 
long, but it will show the reader the trend and 
temper of his literary method. You will find it in 
the chapter called " Dialogue and Details." The 
author has been saying that " The most destructive 
fault a dramatist can commit, in my judgment, is to 
pass, in the same work of art, from one plane of 
convention to another." To this he appends the 
following footnote — 

" Mr. Israel Zangwill, in his symbolic play, ^he 
War-God, has put blank verse to what I believe to 
be a new use, with noteworthy success. He writes 
in very strict measure, but without the least in- 
version or inflation, without a touch of Elizabethan, 
or conventionally poetic, diction. He is thus 
enabled to use the most modern expressions, and 
even slang, without incongruity ; while at the same 
time he can give rhetorical movement to the 
speeches of his symbolic personages, and, in passages 



24 More Authors and I 

of argument, can achieve that clash of measured 
phrase, against measured phrase, which the Greeks 
called ' stichomythy ' ; and which the French 
dramatist sometimes produces in rapid rapier-play 
with the Alexandrine. Mr. Zangwill's practice is 
in absolute contradiction of the rule above sug- 
gested that blank verse, to be justified in drama, 
ought to be lyrical. His verse is a product of pure 
intellect and wit, without a single lyric accent. It 
is measured prose ; if it ever tries to be more, it 
fails. I think, then, that he has shown a new use 
for blank verse, in rhetorico-symbolic drama. But 
it is no small literary feat to handle the measure as 
he does." 

Of course he has written a book on America (we 
all do), with a section on " The American Lan- 
guage," which begins — " Nothing short of an 
imperative sense of duty could tempt me to set 
forth on that most perilous emprise, a discussion of 
the American language." 

I pass this section. Mr. H. L. Mencken's eye is 
on us. 

I turn from the present to the past, to the day 
when I first met William Archer. It was evening, 
an evening in 1889, and the occasion was the first 
performance of Ibsen's A DolVs House at the old 
Novelty Theatre in London, with Janet Achurch 
as Nora. William Archer and Bernard Shaw sat 
just in front of me. So impressed was I with this 
play (Ibsen was new to me : he opened the gates) 
that I went the second night, and again on the third 
and fourth nights. And I am under the impression 



William Archer 25 

that both Archer and Shaw were present again and 
again. 

VV. A., so he signed, was then dramatic critic of 
The World, and it was chiefly through him that 
the English stage became, in part, intellectual and 
educative. He raised it. Now, like Fanny, he has 
written his first play, and you may be sure that if I 
am within a hundred miles of New York I shall be 
at the first performance. 



Later. — I was anxious on the first night of 
William Archer's play, The Green Goddess, when it 
was produced in New York. 

I was anxious because this is William's First 
Play, and I could not help recalling the literary 
men — Thomas Hardy, Henry James, George Moore, 
Joseph Conrad — who have essayed the stage, and 
who have not triumphed. Lo, before the end of 
the first act my anxiety was over. I turned to 
Belinda and said, " This is all right." At the end 
of the second act I said, " This is a money-getter." 
At the end of the third act I said, " Archer has put 
it over." At the end of the fourth act I cheered 
with the rest. 

This play is the work of a craftsman. The author 
of Playmaking has demonstrated his theories, and 
has had the courage, not common among Intellec- 
tuals, to keep his feet on the ground and his head 
away from the clouds. But the play has atmosphere, 
and it gains enormously from the exquisite acting of 
George Arliss and the perfect stage setting of 
Winthrop Ames. Mr. Archer should write an 



26 More Authors and I 

epilogue chapter to Playmaking, under the title, 
" How I did it." Critics are requested to note, 
and to remember that the scene is not laid in India. 
The action passes in " A remote region beyond the 
Himalayas." Those who are acquainted with the 
ways of the British Censor are aware how important 
it is to insist that the Archer- Arliss " Raja of 
Rukh " is not an Indian potentate. 

Still Later. — The Green Goddess ran for nearly 
two years in New York. W. A. was sixty-five when 
The Green Goddess was produced. There is hope 
for us all. 



V. BERNHARD BERENSON 

UNTIL last month we had never spoken. He 
was remote. I caught sight of him in the 
old days — now and again — in his hurried 
visits to London, a dapper man, vivacious, observ- 
ant, attentive, a quick and inspiriting talker, rather 
an esthete, not in the least like the typical ioo per 
cent. American. (He was born at Wilna, Russia, 
and educated at the Boston Latin School, and 
Harvard.) I do not suppose that he ever wore a 
belt, or left off his waistcoat, or that he plays golf 
with President Harding. 

Although he visits America occasionally, spending 
much of his time studying Italian pictures in 
American collections, his home is near Florence ; 
and whenever I have been in Italy, I have always 
had the half purpose of going out to Settignano 
and calling upon him. Probably I should have been 
welcome, as I have said nice things about him when 
reviewing his books, and he told me the other day, 
when we met, that he liked what I had written 
about him, and was grateful. I never called on 
him at Settignano, I was always pressed for time, 
or something silly ; but one day I said over to 
myself the opening lines of Browning's " Time's 
Revenges." They are not entirely apropos, but 

27 



28 More Authors and I 

there is a flash of a recognition of our case in 
them — 

" I've a Friend, over the sea ; 
I like him, but he loves me. 
It all grew out of the books I write ; 
They find such favour in his sight 
That he slaughters you with savage looks 
Because you don't admire my books." 

In a way the last two lines are apropos, for I have 
again and again defended Berenson's art theories 
and demonstrations among my over-critical art 
friends. There are, alas, so many experts who let 
their disagreements with an author blind them to 
the gratitude they should feel for him, like the 
man who could not see the great beauty of Brooklyn 
Bridge because, in his opinion, some of the rivets 
close at hand were unsymmetrical. 

Bernhard Berenson is one of my favourite authors 
because I am immensely interested in art, and 
because he has added immensely to my knowledge 
of art, and has led me patiently, persuasively and 
with ardent discrimination through the rich history 
of Italian painting. What does it matter if I do 
not always agree with him, or if I cannot 
always follow his line of reasoning ? He himself 
changes as his connoisseurship broadens and deepens, 
and he is not afraid to acknowledge a change of 
mind, or to indicate a deeper insight. 

Doubtless, to-day, he would not write a book on 
Lotto with quite the admiration that he expressed 
in Lorenzo Lotto : an Essay in Constructive Art 
Criticism, published in 1895. That volume has 



Bernhard Berenson 29 

been misunderstood. It was Dot a book in praise 

of Lotto : that not-veiy-grcat painter was used as 
a motive for a disquisition on the Methods of Art 
Criticism. He says in the preface to The Study and 
Criticism oj Italian Art : Second Scries : " Instead 
of an abstract discourse on Method, I thought it 
wiser to exemplify method in a concrete instance, 
and wrote my Lotto*'' The unlearned in art 
should turn to The Study and Criticism of Italian 
Art : Second Series, and read the last essay on the 
" Rudiments of Connoisseurship," which the learned 
and buoyant author calls " A Fragment " of a book 
that has not yet been written to be called c; The 
Methods of Constructive Art Criticism." Herein 
are set down the rules by which the advanced 
school of connoisseurs judge a picture, apart from 
its aesthetic import and communication, which to 
the picture lover are the things that matter. But 
the connoisseur is keen on correct attributions, 
and Mr. Berenson notes that the formal elements 
in judging a picture are divisible into three 
classes. 

" The most applicable : The ears, the hands, the 
folds, the landscape. 

" The less applicable : The hair, the eyes, the 
nose, the mouth. 

" The least applicable : The cranium, the chin, 
the structure and the movement in the human 
figure, the architecture, the colour, and the chiaro- 
scuro." 

There is not an essay in these three volumes, the 
First, Second and Third Series in The Study and 
Criticism of Italian Art, that I do not find of 



30 More Authors and I 

absorbing interest, the work of a man who loves art, 
who has devoted his life to it, who is fearless, and 
who never plods along the obvious beaten track ; 
but I am quite prepared to find some of my friends 
who are interested in art, but ill-informed about it, 
regarding these essays on a first perusal as " a bit 
tough," such people as my Manhattan acquaintance 
who said to me point-blank over a dinner-table, 
" Say, sir, what is the difference between Corot 
and Watteau ? " Such as the Virginia gentleman 
who, thinking to please me, murmured, " When I 
go to London I make a bee-line for Landseer," 
And there is the Staten Island dame, who paints 
a little herself, and was troubled because she could 
not find the life of " Amico di Sandro " in Bryan's 
Dictionary of Painters and Engravers, 

That was amusing, because " Amico di Sandro " 
is a fictitious personage, an Anonimo (see the essay), 
imagined by Mr. Berenson, who imitated Sandro 
Botticelli, who may have been his friend, and who, 
under Mr. Berenson's ruthless and constructive 
criticism, becomes a credible person with a number 
of pictures to his name. The end of the essay is 
as good as a Sherlock Holmes denouement. Amico di 
Sandro being established, suddenly a real painter 
leaps into the narrative, with characteristics like 
those of Amico di Sandro — one Berto Linaiuolo — 
and, says our connoisseur, " Amico di Sandro may 
be the historical Berto Linaiuolo." I wonder the 
American Sunday newspapers never reached out 
for this story. 

But the best essay for the general reader is that 
on Leonardo. I delight in this piece of work, 



Bernhard Berenson 31 

because it is so honest and straightforward (Mr. 
Berenson calls it a re-valuation) ; but it chagrined 
those good people who are always hurt when some- 
body tells what he believes to be the truth about 
something they have accepted, because it is easier 
to accept than to examine. Mr. Berenson quietly, 
subjectively, exhaustively dethrones Leonardo — 
and he gives his reasons. This formidable re- 
valuation begins, " As a boy I felt a repulsion for 
Leonardo's Last Supper. The faces were uncanny, 
their expressions forced, their agitation alarmed 
me." 

How much I owe to his four little books called 
Venetian Painters of the Renaissance, 1 894 ; Floren- 
tine Painters of the Renaissance, 1896; Central 
Italian Painters of the Renaissance, 1907; North 
Italian Painters of the Renaissance, 1907. My 
copies are thumbed and scored. These books are 
ideally planned — half illuminating essays, half lists 
of the authentic pictures by the painters discussed. 
There are no better guides to Italian painting, its 
beginning, its growth, its flowering, than these 
books, and herein you will read of " tactile values," 
a phrase that has been so widely discussed in art 
circles (" to realize form we must give tactile values 
to retinal sensations "), perhaps too widely, for long 
afterward Mr. Berenson had to explain that " tactile 
values " is only one element in a picture, that there 
are others, that there is " spiritual significance," so 
obvious that he took it for granted the reader would 
recognize its existence without undue stressing. 

Again and again in his books he mentions his 
" master," Morelli, who really began the modern 



32 More Authors and I 

method of connoisseurship, measuring the eyes, ears, 
lips, etc., seeking accuracy of attributions from the 
rule that painters do not vary materially in their 
drawing and modelling of eyes, ears, lips, etc. But 
the author of Venetian Painting in America, his 
latest book, has more heart than Morelli, and the 
pattern and insight of his essays have a deeper 
philosophy. 

I met him under ideal circumstances. It was 
in the New York apartment of Mr. Carl Hamilton, 
the young man who made it the purpose of his 
life to own some of the finest examples by the Old 
Masters. I went round them with Mr. Berenson 
as guide — Cimabue, Bellini, Botticelli, Piero della 
Francesca, Mantegna — to name but five. It was 
a great art adventure — unforgettable. And I have 
met him, too, in a gallery, here and there, for it is 
something for a modern artist to persuade Berenson 
to look at his pictures. On one of these occasions 
the young painter who was holding a one-man 
exhibition rushed up to me as I entered the gallery, 
with outstretched hand, crying, " Are you Mr. 
Berenson ? " I gave him the answer that I gave a 
voice on the telephone, who, when I was living in 
Westminster, after a lot of ringing, demanded if I 
was the House of Lords. In each case I answered, 
" No ! " 

I am confident that I am not too enthusiastic 
about Mr. Bernhard Berenson, whose art en- 
thusiasm I began to hear about soon after his 
Harvard days. That some people in the busy 
world are also enthusiastic is shown by a page of 
Vanity Fair, which I have preserved. It is 



Bernhard Berenson 33 

called " We Nominate for the Hall of Fame " : it 
contains five portraits, and one of them is " Bern- 
hard Berenson — Because he has written that splendid 
series of books on Italian art which light our way 
across the museums. . . ." 



VI. ROBERT BRIDGES 

WHEN, in 1 91 3, it became necessary to choose 
a new Poet Laureate, the voice of England 
clamoured for Rudyard Kipling. I do 
not mean to say that there were meetings in Tra- 
falgar Square, and fugitive riots ; for the Man in 
the Street is much more interested in his breakfast, 
in catching his morning train, and in preparing to 
earn his daily living, than in helping to choose a 
new Poet Laureate. Moreover, the office is rather- 
laughed at, for although it has been held by men 
of genius, it has also been held by mediocrities ; 
and the mere idea of any connection between 
Poetry and Officialdom would make, as Andrew 
Lang might have put it, a cat laugh. 

But the Man in the Street in England, although 
he may not read a line of poetry from one year's end 
to the other, is conscious of the past ; he enjoys a 
Tradition or even an Abuse if it does not interfere 
with his habits. He likes the Lord Mayor's gilt 
coach, the mature Beefeaters who guard the Crown 
jewels, the black ties that all naval officers wear, 
and the notion of a Poet Laureate, for there the 
abstract becomes a concrete concept, which is 
what the Man in the Street understands. 

He also likes the verse of Rudyard Kipling — from 
" Recessional " to the " Absent-Minded Beggar " ; 
from " What Do They Know of England, Who 

34 



Robert Bridges 35 

Only England Know " to the " Barrack- Room 
Ballads " ; and when he gave any consideration to 
the question, " Who shall be the next Poet 
Laureate ? " naturally he said, after a brief mental 
consideration of the very few names of poets he 
knew—" Why, Kipling:' 

That was the opinion of most people, except, of 
course, the Government official or the officials 
whose duty it is to advise the king on the choice of 
a Poet Laureate. These functionaries want a safe 
man, not necessarily the best man, but one who is 
pleasing to certain interests, and who will not shock 
or disturb anybody. A William Cullen Bryant will 
always be chosen, never a Walt Whitman. 

Of course all highly cultured persons in England 
knew all about Robert Bridges, including his con- 
temporaries at Eton, and Corpus Christi College, 
of which he is an Honorary Fellow ; also many 
Oxford dons, active and passive ; and his com- 
panions at St. Bartholomew's and the Children's 
Hospital, from which he retired in 1882 to devote 
himself, I presume, to the Muse. But the Working 
Journalist knew little more about him than the 
Man in the Street. 

So when the news was flashed through the United 
Kingdom and Ireland, to the dominions beyond the 
seas, and to America that Robert Bridges had been 
appointed Poet Laureate (some Americans, I am 
told, thought that the recipient of the honour was 
Robert Bridges, editor of Scribner's Magazine) 
there was a great searching in reference books for 
something to say about the new Poet Laureate. 
That day the British Working Man read, or probably 



36 More Authors and I 

his wife spelled it out aloud to him, that Robert 
Bridges is author of various plays and poems, 
including " The Growth of Love," " Prometheus 
the Firegiver," " Eros and Psyche," " Nero," 
" Palicio," " Ulysses," " Christian Captives," 
" Achilles in Scyros," and " Demeter, a Masque " ; 
also of Essay on Milton's Prosody and a Critical 
Essay on Keats. 

The writers on the weekly journals, who are 
sometimes better informed than those on the dailies, 
and who certainly have more time, turned to The 
Oxford Book of English Verse, and finding nine 
poems by Robert Bridges in that excellent anthology 
(Francis Thompson has one poem only) were able 
to present to their readers a tolerable statement of 
the Poet Laureate as Poet. They were able to 
quote — 

" Love, from whom the world begun, 
Hath the secret of the sun. 
Love can tell, and love alone, 
Whence the million stars were strewn. ..." 

And— 

" Whither, O splendid ship, thy white sails crowding, 
Leaning across the bosom of the urgent West, 
That fearest nor sea rising, nor sky clouding, 

Whither away, fair rover, and what thy quest ? " 

And— 

" The hazy darkness deepens, 
And up the lane 
You may hear, but cannot see, 
The homing wain." 

But these are just the beginning of Robert 
Bridges, the few poems that have crept into an 



Robert Bridges 37 

anthology. Oh, there is also that fine, stalwart 
thing, which he calls " Johannes Milton Senex," 
beginning — 

" Since I believe in God the Father Almighty, 

Man's Maker and Judge, Overrider of Fortune, 
'Twere strange should I praise anything and refuse Him 
praise. . . ." 

This is the only poem by himself which the Poet 
Laureate has included in his Anthology — The 
Spirit of Man. 

You see I am making the best case that I can to 
assure you that Robert Bridges was the right person 
to be Poet Laureate. But do I succeed ? His 
longer poems, his dramas and his masques, have the 
look of Poetical Works, and they conduct them- 
selves just as Poetical Works should, but I will 
present a new hat to anybody who can assure me 
that he has got to the end of " Prometheus the 
Firegiver " ; " Demeter, a Masque " ; and " Eros 
and Psyche " ; or any of the others, even the thirty 
and more pages of " The Growth of Love." Cer- 
tain sweet girl undergraduates, with golden or 
other hair, must be quite familiar with " Demeter, 
a Masque," because, on the title-page I find this — 
" Written for the Ladies at Somerville College and 
acted by them at the Inauguration of their new 
Building in 1904." 

I fear, however, that Robert Bridges, as Poet 
Laureate, is a disappointment to the Man in the 
Street, for the simple reason that he expects the 
Poet Laureate to signalize every important national 
event with a poem in The Times on the morning 



38 More Authors and I 

after it has happened. Rudyard Kipling can do 
that. Robert Bridges cannot. How often, during 
the war years, on the morrow of some Victory or 
Home-coming, or Thanksgiving, did I hear the 
Man in the Street say, " Why doesn't the Poet 
Laureate butt in ? " 

And yet I am coming to the conclusion that 
Robert Bridges is entirely the right kind of Poet 
Laureate. He does not strike the lyre in honour 
of the retirement of Mr. Warner from active cricket, 
or for the home-coming of the Prince of Wales ; 
for his muse is cloistral, classical, and gentle and 
does not cotton to acclamations and events. But 
he has done much in other ways ; he has, against 
odds, held the citadel of good breeding in letters, 
and he has striven to uphold the purity of the 
English tongue. I need only remark that he is 
the originator of the Society of Pure English, and 
author of that pamphlet of constructive idealism, 
The Necessity of Poetry. Above all he is the com- 
piler of The Spirit of Man. That was his war 
work, done in the darkest days. It gave, and is 
giving, heart to many. Knowing all this I submit 
that a man can be an excellent Poet Laureate even 
if his muse does not become vocal at the call of 
the daily press. Perhaps it is better to aid the 
mission of poetry than to write poems. 

Many of our vocal poets might read with advan- 
tage that section of the Works of Robert Bridges 
called " Poems in Classical Prosody." Here speaks 
a cunning and loving artificer who understands what 
great poetry is, even if he cannot often make it. I 
must copy out a portion of one of them. It is 



Robert Bridges 39 

called " The Fourth Dimension " and under it, in 
parenthesis, and in italics is the word (Hcndeca- 
syllablcs) : 

" Plato truly believ'd hit archety] . 1 

Ideas to possess the fourth dimension : 

For since our solid is triple, but always 

Its shade only double, solids as umbrae 

Must lack equally one dimension also. 

Could Plato have avoided or denied it ? 

So Saint Paul, when in argument opposing 

To our earthly bodies, bodies celestial, 

Meant just those pretty Greek aforesaid abstracts 

Of four Platonical divine dimensions." 

The man who wrote this could hardly have 
written the " Absent-Minded Beggar." 



VII. EUGENE BRIEUX 

TO me the " Institut Francais du Royaume 
Uni " domiciled in London is a novelty. 
It has appeared, since I was in London last, 
in Cromwell Gardens, South Kensington, " En face 
du ' Victoria and Albert Museum.' " In driving 
past I saw the French and British flags flying outside 
the gaunt building, and wondered what the " In- 
stitut Francais du Royaume Uni " might be. 

I was told that French men and women of letters, 
famous politicians, poets, dramatists, and others 
lecture there, the aim being to make English people 
more conversant with French thought and vision. 
Some kind person began to send me tickets for the 
" Conferences," chiefly on French painting and 
poetry, but I did not attend ; oh, because listening 
to a lecture in the French tongue, even with refresh- 
ments and a reception to follow, does not draw me 
like steel to a magnet. 

But one day I received an invitation to a " Con- 
ference Speciale " at the " Institut Francais du 
Royaume Uni " that drew me to the magnet. 
Indeed, I broke an engagement to attend. The 
attraction was this : Monsieur Eugene Brieux, de 
l'Academie Francaise, the famous French play- 
wright, was to lecture on " La femme francaise 
dans mon theatre." There were also other attrac- 
tions. Mr. A. B. Walkley was to preside, and 

40 



Eugene Brieux 41 

Mr. Bernard Shaw had promised to move the vote 
of thanks — Shaw and Walkley, perhaps the two 
acutest minds in England, old friends, but also old 
antagonists about the kind of propagandist literature 
that Brieux practises. 

I am fairly familiar with the thesis plays of 
Eugene Brieux, and the literary warfare that has 
raged around him. The Three Daughters of Mon- 
sieur Dupont was produced by the Stage Society at 
the King's Hall, London, in 1905 ; Matemite in 
1906; False Gods at His Majesty's Theatre, under 
the direction of Sir Herbert Tree, in 191 7, and so 
on. My attitude toward the thesis play is quite 
simple. If it is well done I call it a good play, and 
recommend it to my friends. The plays of Brieux 
and Bernard Shaw interest me extremely, and when 
critics urge that the discussion of social problems 
should be confined to argumentative books and the 
high-class magazines, I answer — " Why ? " Those 
who do not like thesis plays can stay away from the 
theatres where they are performed. We who like 
them, and who profit by their dialectic, should be 
allowed to see them in peace. In this matter I 
side with Mr. Bernard Shaw rather than with Mr. 
Walkley. The difference between them, in its 
simplest elements, is this : Mr. Walkley wants to 
be entertained in the theatre ; Mr. Shaw wants to 
be instructed. 

Then there is Mr. Arnold Bennett. 

My excellent memory recalled a short essay by 
Bennett on Brieux in his lively volume of dogmatic 
pronouncements called Books and Persons. This 
brief Brieux essay was written in 1910. It begins : 



42 More Authors and I 

" I foresee a craze in this country for Brieux." 
Mr. Arnold Bennett then proceeds to warn the 
English people that Brieux isn't worth twopence. 
That is Mr. Bennett's way, and whether I agree 
with him or not, I find his method stimulating and 
amusing. Here are a few extracts from Mr. 
Bennett's Brieux article : 

" Brieux is a man of moral ideas. . . . He is a 
reformer and a passionate reformer. But a man 
can be a passionate reformer, with a marked turn 
for eloquence, and yet not be a serious reformer. 
... I have not seen one of his plays which I could 
refrain from despising (with the exception of The 
Three Daughters of Monsieur Dupont). . . . It is said 
that Brieux's plays make you think. Well, it 
depends who you are. . . . Nothing can keep 
Brieux's plays alive ; they are bound to go precisely 
where the plays of Dumas fils have gone, because 
they are false to life. I do not expect to kill the 
oncoming Brieux craze, but I will give it no quarter." 

There ! That was Mr. Bennett's opinion some 
years ago. I do not suppose that he has changed. 

Now the decks are getting cleared for action. 
Scene — the peaceful " Conference Speciale." In 
the centre Monsieur Brieux, on one side, Pan-like, 
Bernard Shaw, on the other side courteous and 
careful A. B. Walkley, supported (far away) by the 
unbending, vehement, inflexible Arnold Bennett. 
It would have been perfect if Mr. Bennett could 
have been persuaded to move a vote of thanks to 
Mr. A. B. Walkley. But nobody can persuade 
Arnold Bennett ever to make a speech. As to the 
audience, there was the French Ambassador a 



Eugene Brieux 43 

sprinkling of lords, a large number of well-dressed 
amiable and appreciative Frenchwomen and English- 
women, and a few men, Intellectuals, I am sure, 
who looked, as they always do on these occasions, as 
if they were a little surprised to find themselves in 
^ch a gathering. 

Also, there was Mrs. Bernard Shaw (Charlotte F. 
Shaw) sitting modestly at the back of the platform. 
She has had a hand in the English fame of Brieux : 
indeed I believe that she began it. 

On my table reposes a book with this title — 
4k Three Plays by Brieux. With a preface by Bernard 
Shaw. The English Versions by Mrs. Bernard 
Shaw, St. John Hankin, and John Pollock." The 
title-page does not mention the inclusion of a 
Foreword by Airs. Bernard Shaw, in which she 
describes how : during the winter of 1906-7, she 
became possessed of a copy of Maternite by Brieux, 
and how, when she had finished it, " I felt an event 
had occurred, and a new possession came into my 
life/' I can imagine Mrs. Shaw and Bernard 
talking it over, growing more and more enthusiastic 
as morning after morning Mrs. Shaw through that 
M chilly winter and spring " strove to make the 
translation " as perfect as I could." Then, when 
it was at last finished, and two other plays included, 
the volume was published in 191 7 with one of those 
long prefaces (forty pages) by Bernard — forthright, 
acute, Shavian — analyzing and applauding Brieux 
— M the only French dramatist whose fame crosses 
frontiers and channels, and fills the Continent." 

Also on my table lies another volume of trans- 
lations of plays by Brieux — Woman on Her Own, 



44 More Authors and I 

False Gods, and The Red Robe, with a preface by 
Brieux himself, memorable for this confession — 
" La Foi (' False Gods ') is without a doubt, of 
all my plays, the one which has cost me the most 
labour and the one upon which I have expended the 
most thought and time." The end of the preface 
by Brieux is this : " The problems which I have 
studied I am sure I have not brought to their final 
solutions. My ambition was to draw and keep the 
attention of honest people on them by means of 
the theatre." 

As far as I can gather the difference between a 
" Conference " and a lecture is that at a " Con- 
ference " the speaker sits. Monsieur Brieux sat 
informally at a table in the centre of the platform, 
and Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. Walkley erect, and 
very wide awake, on either side of their distinguished 
guest. Erect and wide awake ? Because they were 
on guard. Mr. Walkley knew that Mr. Shaw, in 
his speech, would chaff him. Mr. Shaw knew that 
Mr. Walkley would make sly allusions to his thesis 
drama propaganda. And Monsieur Brieux, knowing 
no English, would not have the slightest notion of 
what either of them was saying. 

It all turned out beautifully, and just as I had 
expected. Monsieur Brieux, who is now clean- 
shaven, and looks as Mr. Asquith did some years 
ago, defended Frenchwomen from the aspersions 
of French novelists, and read portions of his own 
plays in support of his argument. His address was 
a perfect example of the way such things should be 
done — intimate, intriguing, with just enough action. 
It was the art of the " drawing-room " theatre 



Eugene Brieux 45 

transferred to the platform. I understood most of 
it, or some of it, and when I was at fault, Belinda 
at my left, and two ardent Frenchwomen in front 
" put me wise," until our neighbours cried " hush." 

I might have understood more had I not been 
engrossed in watching the faces of Mr. Shaw and 
Mr. Walkley, making mental points ; and seeing, in 
the mind's eye, the scowl on the face of Mr. Arnold 
Bennett at this adulation of Brieux. For Mr. 
Walkley in his speech was so courteous and Gallic 
that the Man in the Street, if by chance he had 
strolled into the " Conference," would have been 
amazed were he told that Mr. Walkley had ever 
yawned at a Brieux thesis play. 

Mr. Shaw, in his speech, was just himself. In 
ringing tones he commended and applauded Brieux, 
comparing him with Hogarth, inasmuch as Hogarth 
in painting, and Brieux in playwriting, are originals, 
and invent their own technique to meet their 
needs. He also told the audience that, in the 
French drama, there was no great creative figure 
between Moliere and Brieux. And he congratu- 
lated Mr. Walkley on the evidences of interest he 
showed, on this occasion, in having his mind 
improved. 

In their speeches both Mr. Shaw and Mr. Walkley 
regretted that shyness prevented them from making 
their remarks in French. I determined that Mon- 
sieur Brieux should know that one Englishman, at 
least, in the audience could overcome the affliction 
of shyness. So, at the reception that followed, 
when I was wafted into the presence of this dis- 
tinguished Frenchman, and presented to him, I 



46 More Authors and I 

said, with deliberation, pronouncing each word 
carefully : " Monsieur Brieux, j'ai recu beaucoup 
de plaisir de votre conference charmante." 

As we retired from the Presence I said to Belinda — 
" Didn't I do that well ? " 

She gave me a look which may have meant — " I 
am proud of you." 



VIII. A. H. BULLEN 

WAS A. H. Bullen a typical scholar? If I 
were writing a novel, which needed a 
scholar as a leading character, should I 
explore my memories of A. H. Bullen and use him 
as a basis ? I do not think so. He was not at all 
like the typical scholar accepted of literature and 
drama. Yet he was a real scholar ; but he was also 
something else. He was a poet at heart, and also 
in act to a small extent. For there lies before me 
a little book of fifty-four pages, called Jf'ccping- 
Cross and Other Rimes, a posthumous volume, with 
a photograph of himself as the frontispiece, seated 
in his house at Stratford-upon-Avon, against the 
entrance to the garden. He is reading a folio ; his 
great " fluff of hair " catches the eyes ; and some- 
where near to where he is sitting is the Stratford- 
upon-Avon Printing Press, which he founded, and 
where he printed his great Shakespeare, and so 
many other fine editions of Elizabethan and 
Restoration poets and dramatists. 

One of his dreams — this Printing Press at 
Stratford-upon-Avon — came true. He had been 
fired in 1903 with the ambition to print and 
publish a great edition of Shakespeare's Complete 
V/orks in the poet's native town, and so he acquired 
a lease of the house of Julius Shaw, the friend of 
Shakespeare, and the first witness to his will. In 

47 



48 More Authors and I 

this house, two doors to the north of New Place, 
from 1904 to 1907, the type of the ten volumes of 
the Stratford Town Shakespeare was composed by 
Stratford men. 

Bullen wrote, mostly in pencil, the Notes to the 
" Shakespeare Head " edition of the Sonnets, a 
beautiful volume, with a Foreword by Mr. Brett- 
Smith about Bullen, touching upon the life of this 
poor but rich scholar, who was so beloved, and who 
has created for himself a record as an " incomparable 
editor of old plays," the re-discoverer of lost or 
forgotten lyrics, and a student of English literature 
who never faltered in his task. He achieved much ; 
he planned much that he did not achieve ; and 
students and lovers of our English tongue and 
literature will be glad to know that the Shakespeare 
Head Press is to remain, in a large way, Bullen's 
monument. The directors of the Press announce 
that they " are anxious that it should produce no 
work unworthy of its traditions, whether in scholar- 
ship or in printing ; and it is with full appreciation 
of the handing on of the torch that they issue, as 
their first publication, the final word upon a literary 
problem of universal interest of the great scholar 
whom they succeed." 

This " first publication " is Shakespeare's Sonnets, 
a beautiful book, the cover a blue, foliate 
design, the page noble, and simple. The " literary 
problem " is, of course, the problem of the Sonnets, 
the identity of Mr. W. H., and the Dark Lady, and 
the various inaccuracies of the text, which such 
famous editors as Dowden, Thomas Tyler, George 
Wyndham, and H. C. Beeching have tried to 



A. H. Bullen 49 

elucidate. In seven pages of Notes Mr. Bullen 
sets down a lifetime of study of this subject. If 
you desire to have an object lesson in the way a 
Shakespearean student works, procure this book from 
" The Shakespeare Head," Stratford-upon-Avon, 
or from Basil Blackwell, Oxford, and read Bullen's 
Notes. Here is a specimen : " Though some of 
Shakespeare's Sonnets are difficult to interpret and 
a few are so cryptic as to baffle the most searching 
inquiry, it must be allowed that the text of the first 
collected edition — the 1609 quarto issued by Thomas 
Thorpe — is fairly free from serious corruption. 
George Wyndham went so far as to suggest that 
Shakespeare himself saw the first edition through 
the press. ... If Shakespeare read the proofs his 
carelessness passes belief. Again and again ' thy ' 
is misprinted ' their.' Generally we can correct 
these misprints currente calamo, but in two instances 
the reading is doubtful. In Sonnet XXXV, 8, the 
quarto gives — 

" ' Excusing their sins more than their sins are.' 

" Malone (following Capell) changed ' their . . . 
their ' to ' thy . . . thy ' ; Wyndham reads ' thy 
. . . their ' ; and I have ventured (diffidently) to 
print — 

" ' Excusing " their sins more than thy sins are." ' " 

There you have the Scholar condensing into a 
quarter of a page months of reading and reflection. 
As may be imagined, scholarship, as a way of earning 
a living, is not as lucrative as being a movie star. 



50 More Authors and I 

I suppose it is the worst paid profession, and Bullen 
failed even to obtain " that usual reward of the 
English scholar, the honourable poverty of one of 
our greater Universities." There may be a dozen 
people, hardly more, who are excited by a learned 
new edition of Anacreon, or a Variorum text of 
Beaumont and Fletcher. Such things are not 
" money-getters," and so Bullen, faithful to his 
love, and ministering to her year after year, could 
not help being troubled and embarrassed financially. 
He longed to see Greece, to travel there with his 
friend George Gissing. " But poverty held him 
tied at home, and all his voyaging was done on 
winter nights by his own fireside, when he would 
devour books of travel with the lusty appetite of a 
schoolboy." 

I knew him best, and saw him oftenest in the days 
when he was associated with Mr. Lawrence in the 
firm of Lawrence & Bullen. They had offices on 
the ground floor, a large area, divided into many 
rooms, at Henrietta Street, Covent Garden. When 
The Studio was started I persuaded Messrs. Lawrence 
& Bullen to allow us the use of the two front rooms 
overlooking the street, and so it happened that at 
odd hours of the day I would stroll down the 
passage to the partners' room of Lawrence & Bullen 
and discuss — anything. Lawrence sat at one end 
of the mahogany, manuscript and book-littered 
table, Bullen at the other. Lawrence was some- 
times out, Bullen was always in, and always with a 
pipe in his mouth and a book before him, and 
always a book that was a hundred or more years 
old, and always he had a smile of welcome for me. 



A. H. Bui ten 51 

From this firm issued, in peacock blue and gold, 
the delightful Muses Library — Blake, Gay, Marvcll, 
Drummond, Henry Vaughan, Herrick, Waller, 
Donne, Carew, Browne — a set of which I bought 
some time later when it was " remaindered." It 
was early in those days for beautiful, scholarly 
books. The Public had hardly begun to acquire 
them. Bullen was a pioneer, not a money-maker. 

Do you know John Mascfield's description of 
A. H. Bullen ? " I saw him under two conditions : 
the one in London, where he was always among 
scholars and writers, in rooms in the Inns of Court, 
or in dark supper-rooms in the Strand, talking of 
Elizabethan books and people much as though 
they were alive in the streets outside, like the time 
come back. The other condition was in Strat- 
ford, where I only saw him twice, both times in 
springtime. And my memory of him is of his 
overflowing welcome of good- will and kindness. 
. . . Then I remember there was sunshine both 
times, and he was delighting in the spring, and in 
being in Stratford, so near to where Shakespeare 
knew the spring." 

Of creative work there is nothing but this little 
sheaf of songs, Weeping-Cross and Other Rimes, with 
a touching impression of him by M. T. D. The 
poems are not the poems of a professional poet : 
they are the fugitive cries of a man who lived all his 
life with the work of poets, and who now and then, 
under the stress of emotion, fashioned verses that 
are more Elizabethan than Georgian, and that 
have a curious way of arresting the attention. Here 
is one — an excursion of this bookish man into the 



52 More Authors and I 

larger and less tranquil life of the world. He calls 
it " Looking Forward " — 

" ' After the war,' I hear men say, 
' Never a war will be. 
A League of Nations will bear sway 
O'er earth and sky and sea.' 

Ah, but if e'er should dawn a day 

By Fate's malign decree, 
When England lies the sport and prey 

Of crazed Democracy ! 

Better unending battle-fray 

So English hearts be free, 
Than mutely wear to dull decay 

In ignobility." 

And here is a final impression of A. H. Bullen 
contributed by M. T. D. — an impression that 
stays — " I can see him now, dog at heel, leisurely 
pacing the rough green ridges of the great field that 
leads to Shottery, while chanting under his breath 
some tag or end of song. . . ." 



IX. FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT 

WAS it the year 1883 ? I think so. It may 
have been 1882. At any rate it was the 
year when I attended my first dance and 
had my first literary conversation with a charming 
but, to me, rather formidable young partner. 

We had danced together tolerably well ; we 
had adjourned to a conservatory ; we were seated 
under a palm ; above us hung a discreetly radiant 
Japanese lanthorn (a novelty at that time and all 
the rage) ; I was becoming aware that my surge of 
small talk was ebbing, when my charming partner 
exclaimed suddenly, " I hated coming here to-night." 

My face expressed chagrin. I was too young to 
be anything but frank, and she, noting my embarrass- 
ment, added quickly, " Of course I like dancing with 
you, but — but when the time came to dress I was 
deep in the most lovely story I have ever read. It 
is be-au-ti-ful. I shall finish it to-night before I 
go to sleep. I should adore to meet Bertha and 
Colonel Tredennis, and dear Senator Blundel." 

" What is the book called ? Who is it by ? " 
I asked in my practical way ; for even then I was 
beginning to be interested in authors. 

But my fair companion was still in the " story " 
stage : she had not reached that state of culture 
when a reader is interested in the author, and 
realizes that there may be significance in a title. 

53 



54 More Authors mid I 

She frowned prettily. " It's about an Adminis- 
tration, something that happens in American politics 
— and oh, the author's Christian name is Frances." 

" Through One Administration, by Frances 
Hodgson Burnett," I suggested. " I read it in 
Scribnsr's. It's a jolly fine book." 

My companion looked at me admiringly. " Yes, 
that was the name. Through One Administration, 
You are clever." 



I have just re-read this charming story after a 
lapse of nearly thirty-eight years, and find its charm 
still persuasive. It is natural ; it is full of sympathy 
and understanding; it accepts sentiment as a 
concomitant of life, which is the view of most 
people, in spite of the hard-headed novelists who 
are popular to-day ; and it shows that Mrs. Burnett 
is a born story-teller. 

Is it still read ? I observe that Mr. W. L. 
George does not include Mrs. Burnett in his division 
of British novelists into the Neo- Victorian, the 
Edwardian, and the Neo-Georgian ; but perhaps 
Mr. George regards Mrs. Burnett as an American. 
In law she is, as her first husband was Dr. Burnett 
of Washington. 

She was born at Manchester, England ; at the 
age of sixteen she was taken by her parents to 
Knoxville, Tennessee. She travels much, and it 
would seem that she has not quite been able to make 
up her mind about her nationality, as in the English 
Who's Who she gives her address as Maytham 
Hall, Rolvenden, Kent, and in the American Who's 



Frances Hodgson Burnett 55 

Who as Plandome, Long Island. r rhat, 1 think, is her 
real home. There in recent years she wrote The 
Shuttle, T. Tembaron and The Head of the House of 
Coombe. She likes to spend her winters in Bermuda. 

Her literary activities arc many and various. 
They include "Juveniles," as books written for 
children are called ; and so I come to that delightful 
study by this most natural, most sincere, most 
sympathetic of writers, who has never acquired a 
manner because her style is herself ; who has not 
modelled herself on anybody ; whose books show 
not the slightest influence of Turgenev, Flaubert, de 
Maupassant or Meredith ; who just writes on simply 
and directly because she has the story-teller's gift 
(it's a rare gift), and a rare feeling for and understand- 
ing of children. Rightly she gives her recreation as 
44 Improving the Lot of Children." 

The book whose title I skirted a few lines above 
is The One I Knew the Best of All : A Memory of 
the Mind of a Child. The child is, of course, Mrs. 
Burnett herself. We are shown not only, in the 
frankest and most engaging manner, the growth of 
the mind of a child, but also the beginnings of a 
natural writer, so simple, so inevitable. Young 
people who are in the habit of asking successful 
authors how to begin authorship should read the 
chapter called " Literature and the Doll." With 
this child there was no beginning, just a gliding 
into writing with as little effort as taking a walk, 
when one foot, without thought, follows the other. 
The young author with imagination, or even with 
fancy, never asks advice. He or she simply writes 
dreams. Whether they are marketable or not rests 



56 More Authors and I 

much with editors and publishers. Of course 
imagination was always present with this Child m 
The One I Knew the Best of All, and always alert. 

" It was a wonderful world — so full of story and 
adventure and romance. One did not need trunks 
and railroads ; one could go to Central America, 
to Central Africa — to Central Anywhere — on the 
arm of the Nursery Sofa — on the wings of the Green 
Arm Chair — under the cover of the Sitting Room 
Table." 

And at the end of the book we are told how this 
writing child, in her thirteenth year, had two short 
stories accepted and paid for. The child showed a 
clear head and clear understanding, exemplified 
in the last sentence of her letter to the editor when 
she submitted her first story. The line has often 
been quoted. It was, " My object is remuneration." 

And Little Lord Fauntleroy ? I must have read 
it half a dozen times. I read it again yesterday, 
and the lump rose once more to the throat, and the 
mist once more to the eyes, and I am not ashamed 
to own it, for the gallant little Lord is of the stuff 
that makes the world a better place through a 
philosophy that believes always the best of people, 
and, lo, they become better at the first instant of 
believing in them. Little Lord Fauntleroy, in book 
and play, has fluttered into a myriad of hearts. 
So has Editba's Burglar, again the theme of Inno- 
cence conquering through simple art of being true 
and fearless. 

Mrs. Burnett's first success was That Lass 0' 
Lowrie^s, published in 1877, a story of mining life 
in the north of England, crammed with dialect, a 



Frances Hodgson Burnett 57 

human tale, simply and sympathetically told. It 
bears reading again in these days of Labour troubles, 
for this North Country tale deals with the beginnings 
of the disputes between masters and men. Here is a 
significant passage — 

" The substitution of the mechanical fan for the 
old furnace at the base of the shaft was one of the 
projects to which Derrick clung most tenaciously. 
During a two years' sojourn among the Belgian 
mines, he had studied the system earnestly. He had 
worked hard to introduce it, and meant to work 
still harder. But the miners were bitterly opposed 
to anything ' new-fangled ' and the owners were 
careless." 

Many, many other books, short stories, and 
Juvenile tales, have come from the pen of this 
prolific, conscientious, sensitive and sympathetic 
" born writer." Had she produced nothing but 
Through One Administration, Little Lord Fauntleroy 
and EdithcCs Burglar, these three alone would 
suffice : they have endeared her to the children and 
to the adults of two nations. 

I count myself her devoted admirer, and some 
day, perhaps, I shall contrast Mrs. Burnett's way of 
writing about children with Mr. Kenneth Grahame's. 



X. JOHN BURROUGHS 

ET us have a John Burroughs picnic," I 

I j said. 

" What is a John Burroughs picnic ? " 
they cried. 

" Oh, you simply bear him in mind during the 
picnic, talk about him at intervals, try to be con- 
scious of his presence when you are attracted by a 
plant, a tree, or a bird ; and each of you, when 
the talk languishes, should intrude with a view of 
Burroughs, or a memory, or a reflection. That's a 
John Burroughs picnic. Don't stress the note : 
don't let us force ourselves to be thinking of him at 
every twist and turn of the walk ; just let him be 
the presiding influence — that's all." 

" On New Year's Day," said Mary Ann, " my 
husband gave me a copy of John Burroughs' latest 
book — Accepting the Universe, I read the last 
essay first, I always begin at the end of a book. 
The essay is on Walt Whitman. He knew Walt for 
thirty years. The essay is a wonderful pan-e — 
panegr " 

" Panegyric," I suggested. " Good. Bring 
Accepting the Universe along with you. Yes, yes ! 
We shall have time for a little reading after luncheon, 
and I don't mind telling you that I shall ask you to 
listen to a passage or so from two books on him that 
I have in my bag upstairs — Our Friend John 

58 



John Burroughs 59 

Burroughs by Clara Barrus, and Rambles with John 
Burroughs by de Loach. J also have a big envelope 
crammed with newspaper extracts and photographs ; 
and if the post is on time I may get from New York 
John Burroughs, Boy and Man, also by Clara Barrus, 
his secretary." 

Belinda smiled. " That's his way/' she said. 
i4 When he's going to write on an author he entices 
his friends to express themselves on the subject." 

" Yes," I answered, " I try to relate authors to 
life, not to libraries. And you know what you have 
to do on the walk, don't you, Belinda ? " 

" I suppose I must make a list of the plants and 
trees that I stop to look at — the kind of things 
that John Burroughs might have liked to hear 
about. Do you know that I was once mistaken 
for him ? " 

" WHAT ! ! " we all shouted. 

" Yes. Some years ago I wrote the Introductory 
Note to an exhibition of pastels, chiefly of flowers, 
by an American artist for a London exhibition. 
I signed the note J. B., Jean Brenchley, my mother's 
name. The art critic of the London Times spoke 
very highly of my effort, and he actually said that 
no doubt J. B. stood for John Burroughs." 

" Good for you," said Patricia. 

Then we began to walk. 

We had all taken the walk before (Virginia, U.S.A., 
was the place), and we all loved it : our aim is to 
follow the river bank as far as the dam, a toilsome 
adventure, for it is ever our purpose not to wander 
farther than ten yards from the water, which means 
jumping freshets, and evading undergrowth ; but 



60 More Authors and I 

it is worth any trouble to reach the green meadow 
that stretches down to the dam, a Niagara in little, 
such colours, such a glory of tumbling iridescent 
water. 

In the party there was Belinda, the Painter, the 
Painter's wife, Mary Ann, Patricia, young Mulvaney 
and myself. 

Young Mulvaney is not literary. He prefers 
automobiles to books, and he would have fled from 
the Burroughs picnic had not Patricia been of the 
party. So I was rather gratified when Patricia 
made it quite clear that she meant to walk with 
me. By the by, Patricia is young, charming and 
intelligent, and, of course, she cannot help being 
Irish. When I tell her this a curious and most 
becoming light flashes into her eyes. Well, she 
walked resolutely by my side, and I was wondering 
how I should entertain her, when she suddenly 
directed my thoughts into the channel that suited 
her. The Irish, I am told, are like that. Said 
Patricia — " I know a lot about Chaucer, and some- 
body else whose name I have forgotten. We 
studied them last term. But who is John Bur- 
roughs ? You might be nice and tell me before the 
others discover my ignorance." She took my arm 
and turned her head away from young Mulvaney, 
who was showing off in mid-stream, jumping from 
boulder to boulder. 

" Delighted," I said, " but I warn you that I am 
just learning all about him myself. You heard 
Belinda explain my method. Ha ! ha ! By the 
by, where is Belinda ? " 

We spied her far up the bank digging into the old 



John Burrouglis 61 

leaves for a shy plant that she had detected. 
" Belinda has found something that would have 
interested John Burroughs," I remarked. " Belinda 
is a nature lover. After me, nature is her cardinal 
consolation." 

Patricia smiled. " Begin about John Burroughs," 
she said. 

" He was the patriarch or dean of American letters 
and he was the most beloved figure in American 
literature. Not only was he the most popular of 
American naturalists, but he was also a philosopher — 
not a muddle-headed philosopher, but one who 
wrote the clearest style, and who convinced you, in 
every paragraph, of his radiant sincerity. He did 
not think with his pen in his hand as so many writers 
do : he collected and marshalled his thoughts 
beforehand, and he was so fair and just that whether 
you agreed or disagreed with him you caught his 
optimism, and you could not help having an immense 
affection for this stalwart out-of-doors man, who 
lived the simple life with simplicity and avidity, 
never with the pose that characterizes so many simple- 
lifers. You must certainly read his Accepting the 
Universe, which may be regarded as his mature and 
final statement about nature and man. And I'll 
lend you my pile of cuttings of ' John Burroughs' 
Notes on Nature,' three questions, and three 
answers, w T hich appeared each day last year in a 
syndicate of American newspapers. I read them 
every day with delight, and at dinner-parties I 
astonished people by my knowledge of, and answers 
to, such questions as — -' Is watercress a wild plant ? ' 
1 Are there large springs in Florida ? ' ' Do animals 



62 More Authors and I 

think ? ' ' How do baby ducks reach the water 
from their nests high in the tree-tops ? ' " 

" You are very assimilative," said Patricia, " and 
I am very inquisitive. Tell me something about the 
life of John Burroughs, what books he wrote and 
where he lived." 

" In early life he ' taught school,' became a 
treasury clerk, then took up farming, and finally 
devoted himself to literature and fruit culture — 
a good combination. He wrote on Whitman, and 
published many nature books such as, Wake Robin, 
Signs and Seasons, Bird and Bough, Camping and 
Tramping with Roosevelt, Leaf and Tendril. He was 
a great Emersonian, and the first article he published, 
called ' Expression,' issued in the Atlantic Monthly, 
in i860, unsigned, was generally ascribed to Emerson. 
But J. B. was a wise man. Quickly he decided, c I 
must get on ground of my own. I must get this 
Emersonian musk out of my garments at all hazards.' 
That he did, and for years and years all that he 
wrote was pure John Burroughs — sane, clear, kindly, 
wise. With him the style was indeed the man. 
He lived on the Hudson, a few miles below Pough- 
keepsie. His home, his houses, his woodland retreats, 
there were three of them, I think, up there in the 
Catskills, are places of pilgrimage. You will read 
all about him and his visitors in the charming 
books I have with me by Clara Barrus and R. J. H. 
de Loach." 

" We might have a Burroughs picnic in the 
Catskills," said Patricia. 

Just as I was about to reply we came in sight of 
the green meadow. We were asked why we had 



John Burroughs 63 

dallied so. I did not explain. But the picnic was 
a great success. I showed them my photographs 
of Fdison, Henry Ford, and John Burroughs at then 
annual reunion at Yama Farms, Napanock, New 
York, and of John Burroughs and Henry Ford 
matching their skill at tree felling. I read them 
picked passages from J. B., then we talked, and each 
contributed something to the symposium. The 
honours fell to Belinda and young Mulvaney. 

Belinda, who had been steadily writing in her 
pocket-book, three pages, each side covered, read 
aloud the list of the plants and things she had found 
on the walk that " might have interested John 
Burroughs." I shall use this list in my essay on the 
naturalist. It will save me at least a page of 
writing. 

As for young Mulvaney, he appeared when 
luncheon was half over, covered in mud and dripping 
water, and after eating much too quickly suddenly 
he said : " Why, I believe I know something about 
the man you're gassing over. Yes, I'm sure it was 
he. I was motoring through Toledo in 191 8, and 
got held up outside the Art Museum — there's a kind 
of park there — by the largest number of children I've 
ever seen in my life. There were thousands of them, 
and they all went up, one by one, to a smiling, thin, 
and quick-moving man, with a straggling beard, 
who was standing on a terrace ; and each child as 
he passed threw a flower at his feet, and the old 
fellow smiled and smiled, and by the time it was 
over the flowers almost reached his knees. I asked 
a cop what it all meant, and he said that the Mayor 
had decreed a Burroughs Day." 



64 More Authors and I 

Young Mulvaney made a hit with his impromptu 
speech. It pleased Patricia. She walked home 
with him. 

There was a wonderful sunset that night, with 
dripping wisps of feathery fire in the golden glow, 
so bright that it was easy to read even in the wood. 
Just before we parted, as a benediction to the day, 
I persuaded Belinda to read that poem by John 
Burroughs called " Waiting." It begins thus — 

" Serene, I fold my hands and wait, 

Nor care for wind, nor tide, nor sea ; 
I rave no more 'gainst time or fate, 
For lo ! my own shall come to me." 

And ends thus — 

" The stars come nightly to the sky, 
The tidal wave comes to the sea ; 
Nor time, nor space, nor deep, nor high, 
Can keep my own away from me." 

" I like literary picnics," said Patricia. 



XL BLISS CARMAN 

WHEN I went to Canada I put into my pocket 
Songs from Vagabonds a. It is full of fine 
things, and does not take more space than 
a notebook. I debated whether I should drop 
Low Tide on Grand Pre into my other pocket, for 
I like reading books in the places where they were 
written ; but Low Tide on Grand Pre had to give 
place to a less useful article. 

It was my purpose when I reached Quebec to 
make a dash for New Brunswick on the coast, and seek 
out Fredericton, where Bliss Carman was born, and 
perhaps also cast an eye over Douglas, near Frederic- 
ton, where his cousin, Charles G. D. Roberts, saw 
the light — another Canadian poet and author. But 
I did not travel beyond Quebec, so I have been 
reading Bliss Carman in a chair in New York. 

I have seen somewhere that this Canadian poet, 
" six feet three in his heelless, square-toed shoes," 
was to be observed years ago in his bark canoe 
flashing down the St. John River ; and in one of his 
prose books, that called The Kinship of Nature, 
he writes of " the little Canadian town on the St. 
John " — his home-town ; but I do not associate 
him with Canada. He is the poet of springtime 
and the open road : he is one of Nature's particular 
children. All the world is his home-town, any forest, 
any river, any place where Pan cares to hide : under 
f 65 



66 More Authors and I 

any sky, so long as there is not a city near. A wise 
State would give such a man a hut in a wood, three 
acres and a cow, weekly groceries, with a motherly 
person to look after him. The wise State would 
merely give him instructions to make songs for those 
unfortunates who are debarred from nature eleven 
months of the year. There is no place for the real 
poet in the world of to-day : he should be given a 
little competence and told to make poetry. 

But as States and County Councils have not yet 
learned how to treat a poet, and as I suppose Bliss 
Carman had to earn a living (the wages of a plumber 
are regal compared with those of a poet), he went to 
New York to edit The Independent , and later to 
Boston to look after The Chap Book. Those were 
episodes. He is a wanderer, a man of the wide 
world, his bed should be in a tree. I remember 
reading an article by him in a magazine giving a 
description of a hut in the wood he lived in, some- 
where in the Catskill Mountains, near Rip Van 
Winkle's country. And I preserved the headlines 
that the editor gave to the article — thus : " A poet 
tells in colourful prose (I wonder what colourful 
prose is) of how a mountain retreat, where he found 
a home for many years, may be reached by the 
wayfaring man." I can imagine the agony of silent, 
retiring, unpretentious, unclubable Bliss Carman 
if bevies of wayfaring men, taking the editor at his 
word, appeared in relays tramping through the 
beech trees to " The Ghost House," with Bliss 
Carman writing lyrics on the porch, trying to 
hide. 

I have never been to this hut in the Catskills. 



Bliss Carman 67 

I have never tracked him to any of his haunts : 
when we have met it has always been in a city, and 
he has always seemed alone. Nature lovers are 
like that. Man is an episode. Trees, birds and 
streams are their familiars. Once I stayed for a 
week in a house with Bliss Carman. He never 
appeared at mealtime, or in the evening ; but when 
I looked out of the window in the morning I would 
sometimes see him going out, and when I looked out 
of the window in the evening sometimes I would see 
him coming in. And once we sat next to each other 
at a supper of book collectors and book buyers. 
He seemed modestly happy, and interested to see 
G. D. Smith, Rosenbach and John Clawson in the 
flesh, but he did not come out of his shell. Silence 
is his hobby. I felt that he would have been more 
at home supping with Pan of! acorns and wild honey. 
He was mute about himself. Had he talked cheerily 
or reflectively on his own sylvan, lyrical work I should 
have told him how delighted we in London in the 
nineties were with his three little books, Songs of 
Vagabo?idia, and other volumes by him, real songs 
by a singer, who must sing as others talk. And 
I should have asked him about Richard Hovey. 

Some of the poems that we liked in those old 
days in London I could have quoted to him, so 
tenacious is memory when it loves what it learns. 

One of them was — 



" Now the joys of the road are chiefly these 
A crimson touch on the hard-wood trees ; 

The outward eye, the quiet will, 

And the striding heart from hill to hill ; 



68 More Authors and I 

An open hand, an easy shoe, 

And a hope to make the day go through — 

O leaves, O leaves, I am one with you. 

Of the mould and the sun and the wind and the dew." 

And I remembered — 

w The marigolds are nodding : 
I wonder what they know. 
Go listen very gently ; 

You may persuade them so. 

Be Darwin in your patience, 

Be Chaucer in your love ; 
They may relent and tell you 

What they are thinking of." 

And— 

u I saw the Quaker Ladies, 

Those Innocents that strew 
The flooring of the forest 
With their tiny stars of blue. 

I looked upon their faces, 

Companioned yet alone ; 
And this foolish heart that loved them 

Grew simple as their own. 

For their eyes are full of quiet, 
And their days are full of peace ; 

And I will pass to-morrow 
Content to my release, 

If but the Wind above me 

Say, ' Wayfellow of mine, 
There be other Quaker Ladies 

Upon other slopes of pine.' " 

Looking through Bliss Carman's books — there 
are over a score of them — finding old friends among 



Bliss Carman 69 

his poems, making new ones, I notice how often this 
wanderer recalls the home of his youth, for the 

thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts. 

" Oh, there the ice U breaking, the brooks arc running free, 
A robin c.ills at twilight from a tall spruce-tree. 

And the light canoes go down 

Past portage, camp and town. 
By the rivers that make murmur in the lands along the sea." 

I began to think that I would end this article 
gently, with meandering quotations from more of 
his poems that I love, when a friend who knew th it 
I was writing on Bliss Carman said, handing me a 
book, " This will interest you.'' 

It did ! Metaphorically, in a literary way it 
felled me. 

It was a thick book of 254 pages, and here is the 
title-page — 

Universite de Renties 
Faculte des Lettres 



These de Doctorat 

Bliss Carman 

A STUDY IN CANADIAN POETRY 

Bjr H. D. C. Lee 

Docteur de I'universite de Rennes. 
Printed by the Herald Printing Co., Ld. 
Buxton 
Telephone No. ~~ 

This thesis is done extremely well. Bliss Carman 
is analyzed as if he were a Blue Book, and within the 
pages is a letter giving an account of the public 

soutenance " of the thesis, and telling how the 



M 



70 More Authors and I 

learned doctors discussed it with force and fire ; 
and how the dean unmercifully tore one of the 
chapters to threads. And all this about a lyric 
poet who makes little songs and loves nature. 

It is as if a cook had bought a few pots of spring 
flowers and had placed them in a cellar, opening the 
trap-door in the pavement above to let air and light 
reach them. A coal cart approaches and the man in 
charge, thinking that the trapdoor has been opened 
for him, shoots a cartload of anthracite down upon 
the spring flowers. 

So I close the weighty Treatise, and open again 
the book of this light-footed poet, open it at — 

" Now the joys of the road are chiefly these : 
A crimson touch on the hard-wood trees ; 

The outward eye, the quiet will, 

And the striding heart from hill to hill." 



XII. R. B. CUNNINGHAME-GRAHAM 

" 1 TOO have heard the Indians striking their 

X hands upon their mouths as they came 
on, swaying like centaurs on their horses and 
brandishing their spears. I too have shivered by 
camp fires, have known night marches under the 
southern stars, down in the grassy pampas, far below 
Cholechel, in Mexico, in Texas, and in Paraguay. 

" Horses I have owned, especially a little 
Doradillo . . . but, basta, that way anecdotage 
lies." 

It is Robert Bontine Cunninghame-Graham who 
is speaking, or rather writing, in the Preface to his 
Life of Bemal Diaz, del Castillo, one of the little 
band of Spanish adventurers who accompanied 
Cortez on his conquest of Mexico. 

When I had finished transcribing the above passage, 
I said to myself, " Why write any more ? This is 
Cunninghame-Graham : this is the man." 

Then I thought that I would also transcribe 
something he wrote about a horse in one of his 
Footnotes — he is an adept on Footnotes and Pre- 
faces, for he likes to comment incisively on what he 
has been saying romantically ; and he loves to 
explain himself in his Prefaces, why he writes, and 
why the public is what it is, and why he goes on 
writing, the reason of course being that he delights 
to write, and to lecture the public : oh, yes, he has 

71 



72 More Authors and I 

Views as to the way the world is behaving and 
drifting, and although a Scottish Laird, half his 
heart is in old Spain, and the new Spain of Cortex, 
and throughout Latin America where the soft 
Spanish tongue reigns, and among the Arabs, and 
nomads, who distrust cities, and love the stars, and 
the fresh face of dawn, and far horizons. He travels, 
and writes romantic and ironical Things Seen of the 
byways of life, which he finds more vitalizing than 
the high-roads. 

While searching for that Footnote on the horse 
I chanced upon this about Spain. It is the first 
essay-story in his little book called Success, and I 
quote it without comment : you, reader, can reflect 
upon it at your leisure. 

" Nothing can stand against success and yet keep 
fresh. Nations as well as individuals feel its vulgar- 
izing power. Throughout all Europe, Spain alone 
still rears its head, the unspoiled race, content in 
philosophic guise to fail in all she does, and thus 
preserve the individual independence of her sons." 

Still searching for the Footnote about the horse 
I found a Preface dated from Fez, Morocco, and 
paused to read it. Toward the end is this — 

" As for myself, I sit in a neglected orange garden, 
in which all day the doves coo in the trees. ... I sit 
and write this Preface to my slight tales. . . ." 

Is this remarkable man, this citizen of the world, 
this dainty and ironic truth-seeker, and sham-derider, 
this aristocrat who is so much at home with the 
proletariat, who is Laird of Ardoch and Gartmore, 
and who fought in Trafalgar Square for the right of 
free speech, this Member of the British Parliament, 



R. B. Cunninghame-Graham 73 

this grandee of the mob, this Socialist Don Quixote, 
at heart a Spanish Conquistador ; this lover of 
modern poetry, and author of A Brazilian Mystic — 
is he beginning to be visible and tangible r 

Ah, here is the Footnote about the horse — 

" To-day a good horse's mouth is hardly eve, 
seen in England, because no need of it is ever felt. 
Even a polo pony turns like a collier that carries 
weather-helm, beside a cattle horse, either in 
Australia or in America, amongst the Arabs or the 
Cossacks of the Don." 

And here is another passage from a Preface. 
He is writing of authors and the trail their books 
leave — faint or firm — 

" Mine, if you ask me, are to be found but in the 
trails I left in all the years I galloped both on the 
prairies and the pampas of America. Hold it 
not up to me for egotism, O gentle reader, for I 
would have you know that hardly any of the horses 
that I rode had shoes on them, and thus the tracks 
are faint." 

I have often seen him on horseback, not on the 
pampas or the prairies — no, in the Row, during the 
London season. It is only the truth to say that he is 
the best horseman of the many who canter along the 
Row, and again it is but the truth to say that he 
is the most distinguished-looking of the cavaliers. 
He carries himself in life, as in his prose, with 
romantic and personal air. I have been told that 
by birth he is the remarkable combination of a 
Spanish Don and a Scottish Laird, but rumour- 
destroying Who's Who is silent on the Spanish Don 
ancestry. He is Cunninghame-Graham of Ardoch, 



74 More Authors and I 

and he married Gabriela, daughter of Don Francisco 
Jose de la Bolmondiere. On the few occasions 
when I have ridden in the Row he has been kind 
enough to salute me, and to glance disapprovingly 
at my steed, as I, in editorial capacity, have glanced 
disapprovingly at his handwriting. He may be the 
best horseman in the British Isles : he is certainly 
the worst caligraphist. 

Our meeting-ground has been a certain club in 
St. James's Street. Thither, when in London, it 
was his habit to saunter, and there we have had many 
an engaging talk about literature and life, and the 
unbeaten tracks of what Mr. Oliver Herford calls 
This Giddy Globe. Our conversation once turned 
on Arabs, and Cunninghame-Graham offered, if I 
would meet him at Fez on a certain day, to conduct 
me on a camping tour through the desert. I 
declined because — oh, some silly reason ! How we 
miss our opportunities. I might have become a 
second Robert Hichens. 

Cunninghame-Graham is a subjective writer. 
It is life that interests him, its irony, its pathos, its 
stupidity, its blunders after freedom : he sees him- 
self picking his way courteously through the muddle, 
administering praise when his buoyant heart is 
touched, and flicks of the whip when he thinks they 
are needed, which is often. He is fearless ; he rather 
likes to bestow these flicks with the assurance of one 
who thinks that he sees more than we see (perhaps 
he does) and is doing us a service in wounding our 
density. Nothing human is alien to his sympathy ; 
he dips into, and is at home in all strata of society, 
and so we find him publishing his short essay-tales 



R. B. Cunninghame-Graham 75 

and sketches (these are essential Cunninghame- 
Graham) in The Saturday Review, which every 
" gentleman " reads, and in Justice, which no 
" gentleman " reads. In style he is a rambler ; 
he has charm, he is whimsical, but you always feel 
that he is writing to please himself, not the bigwigs 
of literature ; and he allows himself, at will, to break 
off in his narrative, and indulge in quaint asides, and 
ironical wisps of philosophy. To some readers the 
sprinkling of Spanish names and place names in his 
stories is somewhat distracting, but persevere, and 
you will be rewarded. In each tale he says something, 
reveals something, that you feel to be truth, and 
not the obvious truth. At heart he is a builder of a 
new world, while enjoying the present one, some- 
what in the detached, amused, sympathetically 
aloof way of Lord Beaconsfield. 

His essay-tales and sketches are collected in little 
books under such titles as Success, Progress, Faith, 
Hope, Charity, titles chosen by the author with 
intention, and perhaps with the idea of giving a 
jar to the self-satisfied. 

He is also an historian, and a very fine historian, 
vivid — with the power of making facts picturesque. 
I have heard his Hernando de Soto described as a 
masterpiece, and himself placed " in the front 
rank of historians past and present." The Life of 
Bernal Diaz del Castillo is a spacious and glowing 
piece of work, and seems to show that he enjoys a 
large canvas after w r orking in miniature ; and I 
found A Vanished Arcadia moving and touching : 
he actually made me interest myself in the history 
of Paraguay. Here, too, is a Preface : and here is 



76 More Authors and I 

the beginning of it. He loves to explain the why of 
everything, including himself, and his power to 
write history — 

" I am aware that neither my calling nor election 
in this matter are the least sure. Certain is it that 
in youth, when alone the historian or the horseman 
may be formed, I did little to fit myself for writing 
history. Wandering about the countries of which 
now I treat, I had almost as little object in my 
travels as a Gaucho of the outside ' camps.' I never 
took a note on any subject under heaven, nor kept a 
diary. . . ." 

What are notes to memory ? 
One thing calls for doing, clamours — " My Auto- 
biography," by R. B. Cunninghame-Graham. 



XIII. JOHN DAVIDSON 

" /^AME to London 1890; wrote reviews ami 
\^j articles until his poetry began to attract 

attention. . . ." 
The above is a brief extract from John Davidson's 
biography. There is pathos in the words " came 
to London 1890." Here is a type of the perfervid, 
hard-working, ambitious Scotch youth, determined 
to excel, conscious of gifts, yet not knowing quite 
how to use them, pouring out plays, poems and 
romantic novels with the quickness of talk. 

In those preparatory years in Scotland he earned 
his living teaching in various schools — pupil teacher 
Highland Academy, master at Perth Academy, and 
so on. In 1883 we find him, no doubt bored with 
teaching, a clerk in a thread firm in Glasgow : then, 
as if he could not endure the tedium of a commercial 
desk, returning to junior masterships in other 
private schools, and while all this drudgery was going 
on the poet in _him had produced Bruce : a Drama, 
Smith : a tragedy, and three other plays which 
were issued in Greenock in 1889 — plays that although 
he seems to have found a publisher for them he must 
have known had little chance of ever being produced 
on the stage. 

I knew John Davidson well after he came to 
London in 1890. He was not in the least like the 
traditional figure of a poet : he was a short, stocky 
man, full of ideas, very opinionated, chronically 

77 



78 More Authors and I 

angry with the world for not taking him at his 
own valuation, vet a very pleasant companion, for 
he was sympathetic and quick of observation. He 
had one recreation — walking. John Davidson was 
at his best during a tramp over the hills, spouting 
his own, and other people's poetry, incessantly. 
He gave me two of his books. They lie before me as 
I write, each inscribed with my name " from David- 
son." They are Fleet Street Eclogues published in 

1893, and New Ballads issued in 1896. These had 
been preceded by Ballads and Songs, published in 

1894, which included, perhaps, the most famous 
of all his poems, " A Ballad of a Nun " — 

" The adventurous sun took Heaven by storm ; 
Clouds scattered largesses of rain ; 
The sounding cities, rich and warm, 
Smouldered and glittered in the plain." 

Perhaps the quick popular success of " A Ballad 
of a Nun " was, in a measure, due to Owen Seaman's 
parody in Punch called " A Ballad of a Bun," at 
which inner literary London laughed, and which 
may be said to have confirmed Owen Seaman's 
career as a parodist. 

There is no doubt that, in the nineties, John 
Davidson forced his way into recognition, and was 
regarded as one of the coming men. At the end of 
Ballads and Songs some favourable criticisms of his 
work are printed. Here is a specimen from the 
pen of Mr. Zangwill, in the Cosmopolitan Magazine — 
" John Davidson is a prodigal of every divine gift, 
pouring out untold treasure from his celestial 
cornucopia. He will turn you a metaphor as deftly 
as any Elizabethan dramatist, and wields as rich a 



John Davidson 79 

vocabulary. All these glorious gifts have found 
vent in the most diverse artistic or inartistic shapes — 
novels, dramas, eclogues, ballads, Rcisebilder — some 
written for the market, but the bulk in defiance of 
it. Of these products of a somewhat riotous 
genius, only a few have the hall-mark of perfection." 

That is sane and just criticism. John Davidson 
was a defiant poet and author. He crossed and 
angered the world, or he meant to do so, and he 
always had a grudge against the world that it did 
not receive him at once, with open arms, and gladly. 
In his writing he lacked charm ; he lacked persuasive- 
ness ; he wanted to storm the heights of fame by a 
frontal attack ; he did not realize that there is 
always a quieter and subtler way round. 

Yet I think that many of his poems will live. 
There is always a small public for the splendid 
rhetoric of which Davidson was a master, and there 
is always a small public to applaud the notes of 
defiance that run through his preaching. But what 
had he to offer a hungry world ? Certainly we were 
not fed by the prose " Testaments " that he issued, 
one after another, ending I think with T^he Testa- 
ment of John Davidson. They were hearty prose, 
full of force and fire, but the world would have 
gained nothing by taking John Davidson's " Testa- 
ments " to its heart. It is his poems that contain 
his finest work, such a poem as that called " In 
Romney Marsh " that sings itself — 

" As I went down to Dymchurch Wall, 
I heard the South sing o'er the land ; 
I saw the yellow sunlight fall 

On knolls where Norman churches stand. 




8o More Authors and I 

As I came up from Dymchurch Wall, 

I saw above the Downs' low crest 
The crimson brands of sunset fall, 

Flicker and fade from out the west. 

Night sank : like flakes of silver fire 

The stars in one great shower came down ; 

Shrill blew the wind ; and shrill the wire 
Rang out from Hythe to Romney town." 

All are not as good as this. He seems to have 
always had an impulsion to cast his thought into verse. 
He goes for a holiday to Hampton Court, and 
writes a poem of seven stanzas about it that was 
simply not worth doing. Here is one of the 
stanzas — 

" Now the echoing palace fills ; 

Men and women, girls and boys 
Trample past the swords and frills, 

Kings and Queens and trulls and toys ; 
Or listening loll on window-sills 
Happy amateurs of noise ! " 

Once, I remember, he was so impressed by a 
swinging nature article in the Pall Mall Gazette 
by Harry Cust that he turned it straightway into 
verse and sent it to the Editor, who printed it with 
a laugh. 

A curious kind of buoyant vanity made Davidson 
think that everything he wrote was of value. Much 
of it was, for many of the poets of that day were over 
gentle and reflective and John Davidson loved to 
burst into their pallid ranks on his poetical war- 
horse. Consciously, or unconsciously, he expressed 
himself in a short poem called " The Pioneer," 
which begins — 



John Davidson 81 

" Why, he never can tell ; 

But without a doubt, 
He knows very well 

He must trample out 
Through forest and fell 

The world about 
A way for himself, 
A way for himself." 

Perhaps the most attractive of his works are the 
two series of Fleet Street Eclogues, which go with a 
lilt, and proclaim a joyous delight in the world of 
skies and moors, far away from Fleet Street ; but 
as Andrew Lang observed, " One never met 
journalists like those in Mr. Davidson's Eclogues — 
men pining in Fleet Street for the country." 

" I would I lay beside a brook at morn, 

And watched the shepherd's clock declare the hours ; 
And heard the husky whisper of the corn, 

Legions of bees in leagues of summer flowers." 

Journalists do not talk like this. Perhaps they 
would Le better and happier men if they did. 

His plays I have never been able to read through. 
One only, Smith : a Tragic Farce, ever had any 
attraction for me. Here is the title-page of his 
collected dramas : " Plays by John Davidson, 
Being : An Unhistorical Pastoral : A Romantic 
Farce : Bruce, a Chronicle Play : Smith, a Tragic 
Farce : and Scaramouch in Naxos, a Pantomime." 
It may be unfair to extract merely a few lines, but 
I stop reading when I reach such passages as — 

" Ivy. — By the light of Hecate's lamp, lamp, lamp f What 
rhymes with lamp ? Scamp ? cramp ? 
Green. — Damp." 



82 More Authors and I 

John Davidson may come into his own yet. 
Certainly he is not forgotten. It has been announced 
that in one district library of Manchester the 
Selected Poems of John Davidson have been issued 
forty- nine times since 191 1. 

The Selected Poems contain thirty-four numbers, 
and I recommend anybody who is curious about this 
perfervid poet to read this volume. My eyes fall 
upon a poem which opens thus — so like John 
Davidson — 

" He wrought at one great work for years ; 
The world passed by with lofty look : 
Sometimes his eyes were dashed with tears ; 
Sometimes his lips with laughter shook." 

The world passes some poets by " with lofty 
look " because the world is busy with many things ; 
but the world is quite ready to be interested in a 
poet if he approaches her persuasively and with the 
art of loving-kindness. John Davidson never did 
that. It was not his way. 







XIV. GEORGE ELIOT 

ON Christmas morning, in the year 1880, I, 
an eager and romantic youth, paced the 
uplands and lanes of Hampstead composing 
a poem on George Eliot. I may have walked where 
Keats walked, but I am not a poet. It was a 
commonplace set of verses, and yet this prosaic 
poem received the honour of publication. It was 
news and editors are human ; it was news because 
on December 22, George Eliot had passed away, and 
I felt, or thought I felt, her departure keenly. The 
last stanza of the poem ran — 

" George Eliot, master, woman and friend, 

Wc who hopefully work on these earthly shores, 
Now wistfully look to the distant end, 
And ask for a life to help us like yours." 

In later years when I asked the editor why he 
published this unpoetical poem, the good man, who 
was also an honest man, replied : " It was topical, 
and besides, your father advertised in my paper." 

The present generation can hardly realize the 
effect of George Eliot's books on intellectual 
Victorian England. In her hands the novel became 
a sociological and spiritual exercise. It was no 
longer a mere story : it was a humanitarian tract, 
a vehicle for the demonstration of abstract moral 
truth. This alone would have availed little with 

83 



84 More Authors and I 

the general public, but she also had humour, pathos, 
and a power of rich and varied characterization. 
To be sure there were anxious discussions in hetero- 
dox, as well as orthodox, families as to the propriety 
of her relations with George Henry Lewes, but as 
time passed Victorian England let the matter drop, 
and contented itself with her genius. 

Recently I re-read Middlemarch, and I arose from 
the reading amazed at her insight and power, her 
poignant sympathy, her vivid characterization, her 
hunger and thirst for righteousness, and I saw, the 
pity of it, how she waterlogged the ships of her 
understanding with the intellectual explorations 
of other people. Victorian culture depended much 
upon great names. There were giants about — 
Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Carlyle, Newman, and 
the German philosophers. These beacons of know- 
ledge which Victorian England thought were final, 
the genius of George Eliot explored. She reflected 
their light and cast it on people — real fictional 
people, the stuff of human nature. 

That eager and romantic youth, to be candid, 
did not derive much pleasure from George Eliot. 
He was too young. (I am writing like Henry 
Adams.) He was more interested in adventures 
in life than in adventures in psychology. He read 
Adam Bede for duty, he read the works of Captain 
Marryat for joy. But he grew up with George 
Eliot. Her novels were the staple food of his serious 
Victorian home. Book after book came out, and 
each was the book of the moment, of the year — 
Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede, The Mill on the 
Floss, Romola, Felix Holt, Daniel Deronda. Each 



George Eliot 85 

was read by the family slowly and reverently, each 
was discussed (" Theophrastus Such " was voted 
dull), each was part of their education, and Dorothea, 
Maggie, Gwendolen, Felix Holt, Romola, Lydgate, 
Dinah Morris, Mrs. Poyser, Mrs. Tulliver, Hetty 
Sorrel, became members of the family circle. They 
discussed these fictional people, they copied the 
author's profound and searching asides into their 
commonplace books, and they repeated with admira- 
tion and momentary longing the only poem of 
George Eliot's that has achieved popularity, of 
which the first and last lines are — 

" Oh may I join the choir invisible 
Whose music is the gladness of the world.'' 

So, on that Christmas morning the eager and 
romantic youth, nurtured on George Eliot, exalted 
by the idea of her effort and aspiration, conscious 
of loss, made with difficulty his poem, crying for a 
life " to help us like yours." That was in 1880. 

How does George Eliot stand to-day ? The 
librarians of America (the few I have consulted) tell 
a tale of unvisited shelves save when high-school 
girls need her novels for class purposes. In England 
she is still read, but the sale of her novels would 
make a poor show against the sale of the novels, 
say, of Dorothy Richardson. Miss Richardson is 
entirely interested in Dorothy ; George Eliot was 
interested in humanity, not in Mary Ann Evans (by 
the by, she adopted the nommc do guerre of George 
Eliot because " George was Mr. Lewes' Christian 



86 More Authors and I 

name, and Eliot was ' a good, mouth-filling, easily 
pronounced word ' "). 

In England, where they are always faithful to 
favourites, 191 9, the year of her centenary, was 
signalized at Nuneaton by a public luncheon, a 
children's festival, a century costume ball, with 
characters from her works, and a proposal to form a 
George Eliot society. 

Reader, if you wish to be just to this great thinker 
and teacher, go carefully through two or three of 
her novels. Then perhaps you will say what the 
modern young woman said, who had not read a 
word of George Eliot, but who was fully conversant 
with the Russian and French novelists. Middlemarch 
came her way. She read it with avidity, passing 
from a patronizing attitude to one of absorbed 
attention, and when she had finished it drew a long 
breath and cried : " Why didn't they tell me about 
her ? Are there any more like this ? " And run 
through her Life and Letters. You will realize 
with amazement her unresting intellectual activity. 
Here is a list of the books she was reading in August, 
1868, long after she had become famous as a novelist : 
First book of Lucretius, sixth book of the Iliad, 
Samson Agonistes, Warton's History of English 
Poetry, Grote, second volume, Marcus Aurelius, 
Vita Nuova, Volume IV. chapter i. of the Politique 
Positive, Guest on English Rhythms, Maurice's 
Lectures on Casuistry. 

Such arduous study had been her pleasure 
throughout her life. She might have become a mere 
learned woman, a bluestocking ; but she had always 
been conscious of a vague feeling that some time or 



George Eliot 87 

other she might write a novel. Instinctively from 
childhood she had been studying people. Here is 
the bold statement of her beginnings : " September 
1856" (she was then thirty-seven) "made a new 
era in my life, for it was then I began to write 
fiction. . . . One morning as I was thinking what 
should be the subject of my first story, my thoughts 
merged themselves into a dreamy doze, and I 
imagined myself writing a story of which the title 
was ' The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos 
Barton.' " 

Scenes of Clerical Life was immediately successful, 
and book followed book with increasing reputation, 
so that in the end this student who spoke and wrote 
four languages, who supplied the profounder articles 
for the Westminster Review, who translated Strauss 
and Spinoza, who lost her faith and consoled herself 
with duty, became one of the five great Victorian 
novelists, the other four being Dickens, Thackeray, 
Meredith, and Hardy. Gradually her great heart 
mastered her mentality, her interest in humanity 
dominated her interest in the intellects of others, 
pity and tenderness coloured the chill austerity of 
the student. 

It is impossible to write about George Eliot 
without quoting the description by Frederick 
Myers, which once read is never forgotten — 

" I remember how, at Cambridge, I walked with 
her once in the Fellows' Garden of Trinity, on an 
evening of rainy May ; and she, stirred somewhat 
beyond her wont, and taking as her text the three 
words which have been used so often as the inspiring 
trumpet call of men — the words God, Immortality, 



88 More Authors and I 

Duty — pronounced with terrible earnestness how 
inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable the 
second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the 
third. Never, perhaps, have sterner accents affirmed 
the sovereignty of impersonal and unrecompensing 
Law. I listened, and night fell, her grave, majestic 
countenance turned toward me like a sibyl's in the 
gloom ; it was as though she withdrew from my 
grasp, one by one, the two scrolls of promise and left 
me the third scroll only, awful with inevitable 
fates. And when we stood at length and parted, 
amid that columnar circuit of the forest trees, 
beneath the last twilight of starless skies, I seemed to 
be gazing, like Titus at Jerusalem, on vacant seats 
and empty halls — on a sanctuary with no presence 
to hallow it, and heaven left lonely of a God." 

. . . And there was light. " Why," asks a 
modern critic, " did she not push at her prison gates 
and come out ? " It is an unfair question. Hers was 
a great nature chilled by the creeping cold of a Time 
Spirit whose essential quality was Fear. 

. . . And there was light — light shining and wait- 
ing for this great thinker, who washed the pan of 
theologies, and found in the residuum only Duty. 

She sought the light in what man had written and 
preached. The source of the light was too simple 
to be seen by this thinker. 



XV. ST. JOHN G. ERVINE 

DRAMATISTS may be born, not made ; 
but two modern dramatic successes were 
achieved by men whose natural talent was 
shaped or made by contact with the stage. John 
Drinkwatcr learned his technique at the Birmingham 
Repertory Theatre, St. John Ervine at that creche 
of dramaturgy, the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. 

Each is an all-round man of letters. Drinkwater 
specializes in poetry and essays, Ervine in novels and 
general articles. Each has flashed into great theatrical 
success, and Ervine, I am convinced, will find that 
the stage is the appointed vehicle of his talent. 

Until the production of John Ferguson in New 
York I knew little about St. John Ervine. I liked 
him. I like him because he is a level-headed Irish- 
man, who keeps cool and plays fair, a blond Belfaster, 
with a neat turn for writing, who has been in an 
insurance office in London, who has written novels 
and plays, who fought well in the war, and who, 
when his fighting days were over, slipped away to 
Cornwall to continue the pursuit of that pleasant, 
but not very profitable occupation of living by the 
pen. 

It was when he was in Cornwall that the famous 
cable reached him. My facts are right. He told 
me them himself when he was last in New York. 
We dined together at the house of Miss Zoe Akins, 

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90 More Authors and I 

who had just made a great success with D Selassie. 
I watched Ervine closely and decided that, socially, 
he is, like E. V. Lucas, an observer, not an actor. 
He would rather make a mental analysis of a remark, 
with a subtle smile flickering on his face, than cut a 
dash in conversation. He notices and reflects ; he 
remembers things said : he told me that he has an 
extraordinary ear for dialect, and that if he were in 
New York for a year he would be able to report the 
East Side method of speech exactly. After reading 
Mixed Marriage, I can well believe this. 

To return to that cable. It was a fine day, and 
the cable, figuratively, came to him from the blue : 
it was from the Theatre Guild of New York, asking 
permission to produce John Ferguson. Ervine could 
hardly believe the message. He consulted Bernard 
Shaw, who gave him some facetious advice which 
Ervine did not take. He is level-headed. I have 
since learned that the president of the Theatre 
Guild had picked the volume, by chance, from the 
plays shelf at Brentano's, and on reading it had 
been so impressed that he had called the com- 
mittee of the Theatre Guild together : hence the 
cable. 

I was present at the first performance of John 
Ferguson, and was much interested in the attitude 
of the audience. The play was a success from the 
first five minutes. St. John Ervine is a realist in 
the finer emotions and aspirations, and he has the 
art to make his men and women seem natural people. 
From the rise of the curtain his characters were 
talking and behaving as they do to this day in the 
kitchen of a farm-house in County Down. This 



St. John G. Ervine 91 

may not be a novelty in Dublin or London, but it 
was a novelty in New York. There was something 
more. When the curtain rises |ohn Ferguson u 
reading aloud from the Psalms of David — " I will 
extol thee, O Lord ; for thou hast lifted me up. . . . 
Sing unto the Lord, O ye saints of his, and give 
thanks at the remembrance of his holiness. . . . 
Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in 
the morning." 

" Them's grand words," says John Ferguson, 
holding up the Bible. 

The sophisticated New York first-nighters were 
thrilled. They looked at one another, as if saying — 
" Grand words indeed ! Augustus Thomas and 
George M. Cohan, at their best, never wrote 
anything like this. St. John Ervine has a fine 
command of language." 

Yes, John Ferguson was a success in the first five 
minutes. I saw the play twice, and in the interval 
I read William Archer's excellent book on Play- 
making and I realized how slightly books and 
dramatic schools can help the would-be dramatist. 
Ervine is a natural playwright, for he depends for 
his effects on the thoughts and actions of his char- 
acters. Only an author with an instinct for the 
theatre can tell what will " go " on the stage. 
Ervine himself has said : " When I write a play, I 
do not think of a theatre at all. To this day, 
although I have had control of one, I am almost 
completely ignorant of the technical business of the 
stage. When people ask me questions about 
' battens ' and * limes J and ' flies ' I have to ask 
them what these things are. I can never remember 



92 More Authors and I 

which is the o. p. side of the stage without doing a 
sort of sum in mental arithmetic." 

It is just this entire absence of theatricality that 
I find so attractive in St. John Ervine's plays. He 
takes a section of life, usually of people in modest 
circumstances, usually his own Northern Irish, 
whom he knows and understands as individuals and 
in groups, as a shepherd knows his sheep. Orange- 
man and Catholic, Carsonite and Sinn Feiner, 
stubborn father, sensitive mother, romantic son, 
they all pass before us. Why, you can learn more 
about the Irish question from an Ervine play such 
as Mixed Marriage than from all the Blue Books 
and Commissions that have been inflicted upon the 
world. But he is no politician. He observes. 
He relates. The audience can draw the moral it 
likes. 

His one- act play The Magnanimous Lover was 
received with as little favour in Dublin as Synge's 
Playboy of the Western World. An Irish audience 
does not like to see its romantic dream of itself 
dispelled. Ervine replied in an amusing way to 
the protesters against The Magnanimous Lover. 
He wrote a little play called The Critics and attached 
to it this note : " I desire to acknowledge my debt 
to the dramatic critics of Dublin for much of the 
dialogue in this play. I lifted many of the speeches, 
making no alterations in them, from the criticisms 
of The Magnanimous Lover which were printed 
in Dublin newspapers on the day after its first 
production." 

Maybe Jane Clegg is even a better play than 
John Ferguson ; but with me the last Ervine play 



St. John G. Ervine 93 

I have seen is always the best. Just now I am 
enthusiastic about Mixed Marriage, which I saw 
recently, and was so impressed and moved that I 
had to go behind the scenes afterward to congratulate 
one of the actors whom I knew, and through him 
the rest of the company. To show how little 
Ervine cares for adventitious aids I may tell you 
that the scene of each of the four acts is laid in the 
same kitchen of a workman's home in Belfast. The 
drama unfolds — inevitably. I have to use that worn 
word. The dialogue ? I dreaded to lose a line. 
It is as ordinary as bread-and-butter, and yet it is 
art. You might hear such talk in any Irish kitchen, 
but you don't. Anyhow one feels that it is absolutely 
real and true to life, and — well, here again is the 
Irish " question " fairly and squarely presented. I 
cannot help thinking that, in past years, if those in 
authority who were chosen to settle the Irish ques- 
tion, both sides, had sat together in the stalls studying 
this play with open minds they would have seen 
light. 

I am such an admirer of St. John Ervine as 
dramatist that I have been disinclined to consider 
his work as novelist. It was unfortunate that I 
should have read his latest book, The Foolish Lovers, 
first. It did not interest me, and I read no more 
Ervinen ovels until a friend, whose judgment I 
trust, began praising Alice and a Family. I read 
it. A delightful book of the Pett Ridge kind, with 
an abrupt ending, as if the author had yawned and 
said : " This has gone on long enough." Mrs. 
Martin's Man is well constructed, but I do not find 
in it the allure, and the direct vision of his plays. 



94 



More Authors and I 



Changing Winds I have not read. Ervine has said 
that Changing Winds is his biggest success, but that 
he likes Mrs, Martin's Man much better. 

The author of John Ferguson, Jane Clegg and 
Mixed Marriage knows his own mind, and he is able 
to express it. To an interviewer he made this 
Straight Statement : 

" No, sir, I am not a Sinn Feiner and I'm not a 
Carsonite. Both factions hate me. I am an 
Irishman, but not a hater of England. I see her 
errors, but also her attempts to repair them, and I 
won't wallow in the past for anyone." 

His foot is well up the ladder of success. It's 
a square, fine climb he has before him, as they say 
in County Down. 



XVI. "MICHEL FAIRLESS" 

WHEN a modern book reaches a forty-eighth 
edition, I, being interested in the ways of 
the reading public, as well as in the 
thoughts of authors, sit down and read or re-R 
carefully to discover, if possible, the meaning of these 
forty-eight editions. 

I had read The Roadmcndcr before. I read it in 
1902 when it was first published, a modest little 
book in a green cover, and if anyone had said to me, 
" Do you think it will sell a quarter of a million 
copies in nineteen years, and that there will be Large 
Paper Editions, and Editions de Luxe, illustrated, 
and copies on vellum, all sorts of copies cheap and 
costly ? " I should have answered, " The Road- 
mcndcr is a nicely written little book, showing a 
great faith, and a great love of nature, and nice 
people who love nature and who have a firm 
faith in the final triumph of good will like it 
very much. For the author is sincere. She loves 
God, and all living things down to the smallest 
gentian, and she expresses herself in poetical 
prose, that carries the reader along in happy com- 
panionship if he is not in a hurry, and when he has 
finished it he puts the book down in a glow of 
cheerfulness and pride, for he has been given a sight 
of the unconquerable spirit of the author." 

All this I should have said, but if I had been asked 

95 



96 More Authors and I 

point blank, " Will this book sell a quarter of a 
million copies, and run through forty-eight editions, 
and show no sign, at the beginning of 1922, of having 
exhausted its popularity ? " I should have answered, 
" It's an intimate, helpful book, and if I were an 
idealistic publisher I might like to publish The 
Roadmender, but I should expect to lose money by 
it." 

That just shows how wrong I should have been, 
and how difficult it must be to be a successful 
publisher. 

The Roadmender was first issued in 1902 as by 
" Michael Fairless," and each edition has borne that 
name ; but it did not require any great perspicacity 
to discern that the author was a woman, a young 
woman, and that she was an invalid, incurable, and 
that she lived a rich inner life, and that her joy in the 
things that are not seen was so consistent and so 
buoyant that no disability ever affected her. She had 
a marvellous gift of looking on the bright side of 
everything, losing sight of the gloom because of the 
light that shines behind it. 

For years the secret of her identity was well kept. 
This was intentional. Those who had charge of 
The Roadmender after " Michael Fairless " had 
passed away, desired that her personality should 
be hidden from the public gaze. The book con- 
tained her message. There was nothing else to 
tell. 

But as edition after edition of The Roadmender 
was called for, and the name " Michael Fairless " 
became widely known, paragraphs began to appear 
in the papers guessing at her identity, and articles 



' Michael Fairless ' 97 

were written by literary pilgrims, with Sherlock 
Holmes attributes, who, with the landscape 
descriptions in The Roadmcndcr and certain topo- 
graphical features as guides, grew warmer and 
warmer, as children say in their game, in regard to 
the locality of the "Michael Fairless" country. 
One investigator, more successful than the others, 
stated in an article full of feeling and reverence for 
" Michael Fairless," that, although they know it 
not, passengers in a daily motor-coach ride from 
Brighton stop at a village which is in the very 
neighbourhood of The Roadmender country. 

All this is, of course, but of extraneous interest. 
Those who care for literature know that a book, 
like a play, is " the thing," and that is really all that 
matters. I am telling the story because it shows 
how deeply interested all sorts of men and women 
were in The Roadmender and its author, even years 
after the book had been published. As the guesses 
continued, and as some were wrong, a little volume 
about " Michael Fairless " was issued by " those who 
know." But for present purposes I copy out the 
" Foreword " to the forty-eighth edition, which tells 
all that need be known — 

" The country amid which Margaret Fairless 
Barber (' Michael Fairless ') wrote The Roadmender 
is that central part of Sussex drained by the river 
Adur, perhaps the least known of the three main 
rivers, Ouse, Adur and Arun, which breach the 
South Downs. From Chanctonbury Ring to Ditch- 
ling Beacon the Downs belong to the Adur, and this 
is the country of The Roadmender. Here, from 
under the ' stunted hawthorn,' the eye looks down 



98 More Authors and I 

on the one side to the ' little church ' on the Weald, 
and on the other to the more distant ' to and fro 
of the sea.' Over all this Wealden valley the ' long 
grey downs ' keep watch, and on the inland side a 
constant companion of the roads is the spire on 
' the monastery where the Bedesmen of St. Hugh 
watch and pray.' 

" Michael Fairless wrote Parts I. and II. of 
The Roadmender in a farm-house at Mock Bridge on 
the Adur near Henfleld, and here . . . she lay 
writing ' The White Gate,' looking out over the 
1 pasture bright with buttercups where the cattle 
feed.' " 

The book is divided into three sections : " The 
Roadmender," " Out of the Shadow," "At the 
White Gate." The first section gives the title to 
the volume, and I remember my disappointment 
that the Roadmender did not continue his com- 
mentaries until the last page. The other two sections 
are beautiful, full of a radiant and refreshing 
philosophy, but one is so interested in the actual 
Roadmender that one misses him, even though the 
same optimism inspires the following chapters. 
They are reminiscent rather than actual. 

Of course there was no real Roadmender. The 
idea is symbolic, a delicate, literary artifice. And 
he is not really a Roadmender at all. He is a stone- 
breaker. Every pedestrian and motorist has seen 
the Ancients who sit on a heap of stones by the 
roadside breaking the flints with a hammer. John 
L. Macadam, a Scottish engineer and inventor of the 
system of macadamizing roads, laid down the rule 
that every stone should be broken small enough 



* Michael F airless ' 99 

to pass through a finger ring, or was it a curtain 
ring ? 

There never was such a Roadmender as the 
spiritual imagination of " Michael Fairless " has 
given to us ; never such a Roadmender who so 
loved and understood nature, and had so clear a 
vision of reality behind the phantasmagoria of the 
material world. And the book has flashes of subtle 
humour too ; see the dialogue with a real road- 
mender who stopped for a gossip, and with the 
parson who paused to lecture and who remained to 
bless. The book begins — 

" I have attained my ideal : I am a roadmender, 
some say stonebreaker. Both titles are correct, 
but the one is more pregnant than the other. All 
day I sit by the roadside on a stretch of grass under 
a high hedge of saplings and a tangle of traveller's 
joy, woodbine, sweetbriar, and late roses." 

And on Sundays, her day of rest, she would lie 
flat on a height, gazing out from the top of the downs 
to the sea — 

" The hours pass, the shadows lengthen, the 
sheep-bells clang ; and I lie in my niche under 
the stunted hawthorn watching the to and fro of the 
sea, and iEolus shepherding his white sheep across 
the blue. I love the sea with its impenetrable 
fathoms, its wash and undertow, and rasp of shingle 
sucked anew." 

It is not difficult to understand why the public 
has taken The Roadmender to its heart. For it is a 
book written from heart to heart. This small volume 
stands as a proof of the statement that everyone 
has one book in him or in her, if they but have the 



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More Authors and I 



gift of expression. "Michael Fairless " had it 
abundantly; and it is most satisfactory to know 
that a book of this kind, not much reviewed in its 
early years, not much discussed, has found a public 
of 250,000 people, and more. 



XVII. ANATOLE FRANCE 

HAPPILY I preserved that picture I cut from 
the pictorial section of a newspaper last 
year. It is a document, this portrait group 
of six people standing in the open door of a country 
house. On the right is a nice-looking woman with 
a large bunch of flowers inserted in her belt. This is 
Madame Jacques Anatole Thibaut, better known as 
Madame Anatole France. He, the unique Anatole 
France, easily first of French men of letters, stands 
in the centre, tall, erect, with the big, square brow, 
the long curling moustache and pointed beard that 
he sometimes remembers to trim. But that which 
draws me are the watching eyes, so shrewd, so 
reflective. The others in the group are merely 
posing for their photographs. He is watching the 
camera, the operator, reflecting, curious, as always, 
about everything in life and in books, in thoughts 
and in deeds. Underneath this photograph is 
printed, " Anatole France and his bride, who was 
Mile. Laprevotte. Taken on their wedding day at 
Bechellerie, the bridegroom's estate near Tours." 

From the pad where this photograph is preserved 
I withdraw other documents, a medley of them. 
There is his letter to the French Minister of War, 
written at the outbreak of hostilities, in 191 4, when 
France w T as in danger. This Socialist, this scholar, 
this great dilettante, this pacifist, offers his services 

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102 More Authors and I 

in any capacity in the field. France is in danger. 
His whims about patriotism, his hatred of violence 
are forgotten. He offers all ; but he does not for- 
get to make his offer in exquisite phraseology, for 
whatever he writes is always beautifully constructed 
with the clarity and simplicity of which the French 
have the secret. 

Next is a page of his handwriting from his War 
book (very Anatolian) called The Path of Glory, a 
rambling, discursive calligraphy, without an erasure, 
firm, but with a tendency, here and there, to a 
flourish. I read his French with interest, enjoying 
his ability always to place the accents just where 
they should be. Follows an editorial (I am still 
going through the pad) on his great speech to the 
teachers at Tours. " Make hate be hated," he told 
them. " Burn all those books which teach hatred. 
Exalt work and love." 

Here is another editorial on " The Boy Anatole," 
he who was cradled in a bookshop on the Quai 
Malaquais ; who as a child " played with dumpy 
duodecimos as with dolls," yearned for military glory, 
then for sainthood, and at the age of ten decided 
that it was finer to make catalogues in his father's 
shop than to win battles. 

Then I took from a shelf a battered copy of 
UEtui de Nacre (" The Box of Pearl "), that marvel- 
lous collection of short stories, containing " The 
Procurator of Judea," and " The Juggler of Notre 
Dame," the first work by Anatole France that I 
read. Has he, in his many books, ever expressed 
himself more neatly and more fully ? I am not a 
good French scholar ; but UEtui de Nacre permits 



Anatole France 103 

itself to be read with case, for Anatole France has a 
style that is as clear as his thought. I remember, 
too, with great pleasure, many of the essays in his 
volumes called On Life and Letters, especially one 
about a performance of Hamlet, so charming, easy 
and pointed that through reading it often I knew 
it almost by heart. And there were two short 
stories that impressed me, " Crainqucbille " and 
11 Putois. ,, 

His long romances and satires I do not always 
succeed in assimilating. The point of view of this 
erudite butterfly is not always ours, and the Anglo- 
Saxon, reading Anatole France, while still admiring, 
is sometimes quite reconciled to the fact that he is 
not a Gaul. Much of his satirical, historical work, 
such as the volumes treating contemporary French 
history, can be followed only by a Frenchman ; but 
Penguin Island, which is considered by some the 
finest thing he has done, is cosmic, and those who 
like it revel in it. 

He is not a real novelist. His romances are but 
vehicles for the expression of his views. When I 
reflect on the works by him that I have read, I find 
that I have forgotten plots and scenes, and recall 
only those parts where Anatole France himself in the 
person of Bonnard, Bergeret, Coignard, Brotteaux is 
talking. This dear, garrulous, kindly, witty, ever 
curious elderly gentleman who speaks through so 
many books, delaying the story, commenting on 
everything, interested in everything, is Anatole him- 
self. He is like the carven Beau that you see in so 
many of Watteau's pictures : in the scene yet not 
of it, ever lurking in the background, smiling with 



104 More Authors and I 

sympathy, disdain, amusement and scorn, liking to 
be there, but always detached, a looker-on. 

Anatole France is most human when he deals with 
his own childhood, recalling it intimately and affec- 
tionately in The Book of My Friend, in Pierre Noziere, 
and in Little Pierre. 

I close my eyes and recall my bookshelves in 
London. I see a shelf of tall red books. I think 
there must be twenty-five of these handsome volumes, 
and others have been published since I placed the 
last one there. On the cover is a laurel garland, and 
from it hangs a medallion with a portrait of the 
author. Around the medallion are the words — 
Maitre Anatole France. This is the English edition of 
his works issued by John Lane, a notable publishing 
feat, probably the only example of the publication 
of all the works of a living author in a transla- 
tion. These volumes issued at irregular intervals 
came to me for review. I wrote a column about 
each of them, and, as I read the titles to-day, there 
comes back to me, bit by bit, the vast, meandering, 
subtle, shining world of learning, fantasy, irony, pity 
and scorn that is Anatole France, who wrote The Book 
of My Friend, and also that amazing, erudite, fear- 
less Life of Joan of Arc that offended the many, 
and delighted the few. 

I saw him once, heard him talk, and grasped his 
hand. His grasp was firm in spite of the hundreds of 
hands that he held that evening, smiling all the 
time. It was a few months before the war, in 
London, whither he had been inveigled by the 
promise of a series of ovations from his many ad- 
mirers. They culminated in a banquet, followed by 



Anatole France 105 

a reception. To anybody else it might have been 
embarrassing, as Anatole France does not add Eng- 
lish to his accomplishments. But he looked quite 
happy through the long festivities ; the shrewd, 
reflective, amused smile never left his face. He 
seemed pleased, but not exhilarated, equal to the 
occasion, but not overwhelmed by it. Rodin had a 
similar look when he was entertained in London ; 
that night when the art students unloosed the great 
sculptor's horses and drew his carriage to the banquet- 
ing hall where he sat listening to the speeches in 
uneasy French in his honour, and smiling. The 
French are a polite nation. 

Of the vast number of essays and books also, that 
have been written on Anatole France, three stand 
out. They are the small volume by W. L. George, 
the still smaller volume by George Brandes and the 
chapter on Anatole France by Frank Harris in 
Contemporary Portraits. 

The little book on Anatole France by W. L. 
George is the best piece of critical work that he has 
done. Educated in France, familiar with French 
thought and French literature, he has special advan- 
tages for such a study. He analyzes the great 
Frenchman with candour : he praises, he is also 
critical. Mr. George is not an optimist. Here is 
his idea of an entry in the Cyclopaedia of Literature 
of the year 3000 — 

France (Anatole). Pen-name of Jacques Anatole 
Thibaut. French writer, b. 1844, d. — . Satirist 
and critic. Some of his work has merit as reflecting 
the faintly enlightened views of an observer living in 
barbarous times. 



106 More Authors and I 

Mr. Frank Harris' chapter takes the form of an 
interview. He did not find the satirist in a smiling 
mood ; but he put direct questions, and received 
direct answers. M. France allowed his interviewer 
to understand that he had outgrown primitive 
pictures, old oak furniture, Corot, and politicians. 
" To me," said the master, " writing is horribly 
difficult — horribly ; " but he acknowledged that 
some of his books were easier to write than the 
others. " But doesn't the mere power of expression 
grow with use and become easier ? " " Not to me," 
replied the master ; " it all depends on the ideas." 

That night in the children's room of a public 
library the real Anatole France, so I like to think, 
drew near to me. On a shelf I saw an open book 
illustrated by Boutet de Monvel. I turned to the 
title-page. It was Girls and Boys : Scenes from the 
Country and the Town, by Anatole France, And on 
one of the pages, beneath a charming picture of a 
little student, was this — 

" He worked with, patience and love, 
Which are the two sides of genius." 



XVIII. SIR JAMES GEORGE FRAZER 

7 HE Golden Bough by Sir James George Frazer 
is a classic. Writing of it The Times said : 
"The book is a great book, in just the sense- 
in which the work of Darwin, Zola, or Balzac is 
great. It lias explored and mapped out a new 
world." The Nation said : " It is probably the most 
illuminating and the most durable classic that has 
been produced in our language in this generation." 

Have I read it through from title-page tocolophon ? 
have I mastered the twelve fat volumes of the third 
edition of The Golden Bough, published in 191 1 ? 
The answer is in the negative. I am candid. 

But all my life I seem to have been dipping into 
The Golden Bough, reading a chapter or a passage 
here and there, admiring the author's sense of style, 
and easy organization of facts, lore and legends. 
And I have looked on Lake Nemi, and on Turner's 
picture (now in Dublin) which was formerly called 
" Lake Avernus : the Fates and the Golden 
Bough " ; and years ago when I was writing a book 
on Turner I copied out the opening of Chapter I. 
of Frazer's magnum opus. It runs : " Who does 
not know Turner's picture of the Golden Bough ? 
The scene, suffused with the golden glow of imagina- 
tion in which the . . . mind of Turner steeped and 
transfigured even the fairest natural landscape, is 
a dream-like vision of the little lake of Nemi, ' Diana's 

107 



108 More Authors and I 

Mirror,' as it was called by the ancients. No one 
who has seen that calm water, lapped in a green 
hollow of the Alban hills, can ever forget it." 

Once I was standing before Turner's Golden 
Bough with a young literary man, who has since 
become famous. He said (I have given his thoughts 
sequence, and some grammatical accuracy) : " What 
a jolly book Frazer's Golden Bough is ! I suppose it's 
the greatest accumulation, beautifully told, of early 
modes of thought, legends and notions about 
religion that has ever been put together. And to 
think that it all started from Frazer's desire to know 
the meaning of a strange and recurring event that 
happened ages ago on the banks of Lake Nemi, why 
it happened, and when it first began to happen. 
Curious how Turner and Frazer have thus come 
together. But Turner wouldn't have cared two- 
pence about the anthropological lore of the district. 
Listen. This is what the National Gallery catalogue 
says in its note on Turner's picture : ' The Golden 
Bough was a branch of the tree of Proserpine, which 
when plucked by mortals, by favour of the Fates, 
enabled them to visit and return from those regions 
with impunity.' " 

My friend continued — I can almost hear him 
talking — " Little did Turner think that an engraving 
of his picture would form the frontispiece of Frazer's 
Golden Bough. I'm glad. It gives the book unity. 
No, I haven't read The Golden Bough all through. 
I dip into it sometimes." 

The first edition, in two volumes, was published 
in 1890 ; the second edition, three volumes, in 1900 ; 
the third, twelve volumes, in 191 1. Frazer is an 



Sir James George Frazer 109 

indefatigable student. In 191 8 he published, in 
three volumes, Folk- Lore in the Old Testament : 

Studies in Comparative Religion, Legend and Law, his 
aim being to illustrate and explain certain traditions, 
beliefs, and customs of the ancient Hebrews by com- 
parison with those of other peoples. During the 
past week I have been dipping into this with interest 
and a kind of sad profit. On the author's other 
learned books I am still less of an authority — say, 
Pa us aulas' Description of Greece and Totemism and 
Exogamy ; but The Magical Origin of Kings, parts 
of which have been incorporated in The Golden 
Bough, held me through a long, light summer 
evening. 

On every page of his books it is plain that Sir 
James Frazer (he was knighted in 191 4 for his services 
to literature) is much more than a student and a 
collector of lore and legends : he is a man of letters 
of fastidious classical taste. Did he not publish, 
as long ago as 1895, Passages of the Bible Chosen for 
their Literary Beauty and Interest ? And I remem- 
ber the Letters of William Cowper, chosen and edited 
with Memoir and Notes ; and Sir Roger de Coverley, 
and Other Literary Pieces ; and Essays of Joseph 
Addison, Chosen and Edited with a Preface and a few 
Notes. The author of The Golden Bough does not 
control a wide torrent of literature, but what he is 
interested in runs deep. 

Joseph Addison ! 

It was Joseph Addison, that accomplished, placid 
man, and reposeful essayist, who guided me to a 
better acquaintance with Sir James George Frazer 
than I could ever have gained from glancing with 



no More Authors and I 

meditative interest at his rooms in Brick Court of the 
Middle Temple. Curiously it was another great, 
and later, literary man who was the unconscious 
means of first introducing me to the author of 
The Golden Bough. Sir James Frazer sat opposite 
me at the dinner given in London to Anatole France, 
and I remember remarking to my neighbour : " I 
have an immense capacity for social chatter. The 
author of The Golden Bough has none." 

Well, I was reading Mr. Edmund Gosse's Books on 
the Table, and came, in time, willingly to the essay 
on Sir James Frazer's three stately volumes on Folk- 
Lore in the Old Testament, and to this passage about 
" the most eminent of British and probably of 
European anthropologists." It was to the point : 
it placed our author. The passage runs, " To us 
people of letters, he is singularly endeared by his 
sedulous cultivation of style, in which Addison is 
patently his master." 

In the following week a piece of good fortune 
befell me. I call it good fortune when the chances 
of literary life bring me into personal contact with 
an author whose works have been engaging my 
leisure, even fugitively. Among the announcements 
of afternoon lectures at the Royal Institution of 
Great Britain in Albemarle Street, I read this — 

" Sir James Frazer. — On London Life in the 
Time of Addison." 

I have always found entertainment as well as 
instruction at the lectures of the Royal Institution. 
A considerable number of men attend, as well as 
women, which is rather rare in the lecture world. 



Sir James George Frazer 1 1 1 

The men, with a few exceptions, are a particular 
type. They have large heads, dome-shaped fore- 
heads, and tangled, untrimmed beards. I believe 
them to be Victorian survivals, who acquired the 
lecture habit in their youth, and have never been 
able to break themselves of it. Whatever the lecture 
may be they always seem to attend. I presume they 
have retired from active work, have their afternoons 
free, and are accustomed to the rather somnolent 
atmosphere of the lecture theatre, finding it a 
reposeful change from the busy life of the streets. 

There we sat ; I, high up, in a secluded corner, 
from which I could obtain a good view of the audi- 
ence as well as of the lecturer. Below me was the 
historic desk from which so many important lectures 
have been delivered. A shaded light throws its 
beams on the lecturer, and on his notes. 

The clock pointed to one minute before three. 
We waited. I imagine that most of the ladies had 
really come to see the author of " that stupendous 
piece of erudition and fair reasoning, The Golden 
Bough" for I cannot believe that the sex is wildly 
interested in London Life in the Time of Addison. 
The clock pointed to three. Promptly the small 
door in the wall of the lecture theatre opened, and a 
man, a small man, with a small beard and glasses, ran, 
it was hardly a walk, as if he were a human rabbit, 
straight to the desk, and at once turned out the 
light. That, I think, w r as a characteristic action of 
this scholar. He does not like publicity — even from 
a lamp. At once he opened his manuscript and 
began to read, in a firm, crisp voice, which could be 
heard all over the theatre, and in a broad Scottish 



ii2 More Authors and I 

accent. I liked that, and I liked his impersonal way, 
without an aside, without any attempt to make a 
contact with his audience ; but this method of 
lecturing does not make for popularity. That, 
probably, is the last thing Sir James Frazer wants. 
He read straight on, clearly, forcibly, and I must con- 
fess that I was more interested in his manner than in 
his matter. He did not throw any illumination on 
Addison : he did not lure that aloof figure from his 
distinguished literary retreat. Many of the Vic- 
torians nodded, but I kept wide awake. 

When the lecture was over I joined the small 
throng of congratulators. When my turn came I 
reminded the author of The Golden Bough that we 
had met at the Anatole France dinner. He had no 
recollection of the occasion. Then I complimented 
him on his marked Scottish accent. That seemed 
to please him : he whispered that he was a Glasgow 
man. There our conversation ended, and I made 
way for another disciple. 



XIX. HAROLD FREDERIC 

1MET this burly, sensitive American author on 
two occasions. 
The first time was in the studio of a popular 
portrait painter, J. J. Shannon (now Sir James 
Shannon, R.A.), on Show Sunday, that is, the day 
on which pictures destined for the Royal Academy 
exhibition are exposed to friends and critics. In 
those times, the early nineties, Show Sunday was a 
very popular social function. The pictures were 
arranged attractively on easels, the visitors came and 
went, and tried to say something complimentary or 
clever. I always found that the best way was to 
creep quietly up to the painter, feel for his hand, 
and silently grasp it, firmly and warmly. 

This occasion was especially interesting, as J. J. 
Shannon was born in America, and there was a 
sprinkling of Americans at this Show Sunday. The 
time passed so pleasantly, that when I furtively 
looked at my watch, and saw that it was nearly 
seven o'clock, I hastened to my hostess to bid her 
adieu, and to thank her for the delightful and unique 
entertainment. She bent toward me and whis- 
pered, " A few friends are remaining to supper. 
Won't you stay ? " 

That was a wonderful evening, not only because 
most of the guests were eminent people, but because 
the talk was exceptionally good. Opposite me was 
i 113 



ii4 More Authors and I 

a big, loosely-built man, who talked extremely well, 
who seemed acquainted with everything and every- 
body, and who had dozens of new stories. I was so 
much interested in him that I turned to my neigh- 
bour and said, " Do you know the man opposite ? " 
He replied, " Oh yes. That's Harold Frederic, 
London representative of The New York Times, but 
his real game is novel writing. You should read his 
SetWs Brother's Wife, and In the Valley" 

I looked at the big man with more interest, 
engaged him in conversation, assuming my most 
modest manner, until his eyes twinkled, and he " got 
back " on me. Our pleasant parry and ripost was 
interrupted by cries for a song from Harold Frederic. 
He moved to the piano, with his table napkin dang- 
ling from his waist — he was rather an untidy man — 
and sang a series of American college songs roister- 
ously, boisterously, yet, when the occasion demanded 
it, with feeling and emotion. The Americans 
present joined in the chorus, and the English folk 
emitted harmonious sounds. 

" What college was he ? " I said to my neighbour. 

" None," he replied. " Frederic was born in 
Utica, New York, went to the public schools and then 
became a reporter on the local paper. He was 
editor of The Utica Observer when he was twenty- 
four. It's like Harold Frederic to know the college 
songs. He's an adept at universal information. 
Why, he knows these songs better than most college 
boys." 

Next week an article by Harold Frederic appeared 
in Henley's National Observer, giving a humorous 
and appreciative account of the evening. No names 



Harold Frederic 1 1 5 

were mentioned in this delightful article. It 
astonished me, and taught me that the " live writer " 
gets his material, not from the British Museum 
Library, but from the happenings of each day — 
a lesson that I have never forgotten. 

A year or so later I met him again. It was at the 
house of the gifted poet, a charming woman, and a 
remarkable hostess, who wrote under the name of 
41 Graham R. Tomson." I was paying a dinner call. 
When I entered the room Harold Frederic was 
seated at the piano singing folk songs and Negro 
spirituals. He was having refreshments at the same 
time : the cup was on the candle stand, and a piece 
of bread-and-butter and a piece of cake were on his 
knee. The crumbs of each decorated his waistcoat. 
Yes, he was rather an untidy man, but he sang the 
Negro spirituals with true darky feeling, and I 
remember that a song about Clementine was encored 
three times. 

Many years passed. To be explicit, it was last 
week when Harold Frederic again crossed my path. 
This time it was one of his books, not himself. In 
those intervening years I had read most of his novels, 
including his remarkable story Illumination, called in 
the United States, for some reason, The Damnation of 
Theron W are, and also his witty and sympathetic 
little book called March Hares. And I had heard 
The New Exodus : Israel in Russia, very highly 
spoken of. Well, last week I entered a stationery 
shop in a small market town in Kent, attracted 
thither, not by the picture postcards, or by the 
packets of writing-paper and envelopes, absurdly 
cheap, or by a Toby Jug representing John Wesley 



n6 More Authors and I 

in the pulpit, but because my roving eye had de- 
tected against one wall of the shop a range of book- 
shelves. Libraries of this nature, in small English 
market towns, are always of one kind : they are 
novels that have gone out of date and out of fashion, 
with a sprinkling of once popular belles-lettres 
books which are all bought by the gross. Roaming 
the shelves I found a copy of Gloria Mundi, by 
Harold Frederic. I was allowed to take it away and 
keep it a fortnight for twopence. 

I read it through with interest. It is a fine book 
but not a great book. For the purpose of writing 
it, Harold Frederic " got up " English aristocratic 
life. The hero is a duke, but the book is much 
more than a mere novel of life in high society. It 
deals with Socialism, and an attempt to formulate 
a system of communal living, in which one can 
detect the beginning of many political actualities of 
the present day. The characters are well defined, 
some of the younger men are especially good, and 
the whole story has an interest that raises it above 
the category of mere yarns. 

At the beginning of Gloria Mundi there are two 
pages of extracts from reviews of his Illumination. 
That, as I have said, was a remarkable work, but I 
am rather appalled by the extravagance of some of 
the leading English journals in criticizing it. If 
Harold Frederic was as exceptional a writer as some 
of these journals make him, how is it that his books 
to-day have almost passed out of circulation ? The 
Athenceum called In the Valley " a perfect specimen of 
an American historical novel." The Daily Chronicle 
remarked, " Mr. Harold Frederic is winning his way 



Harold Frederic 117 

by sure steps to the foremost ranks of writers of 
fiction." The Review of Reviews said : " You will 
place the book with your Hardys and Merediths." 

No, I shall not place Illumination beside my 
Hardys and Merediths. They are in a different 
class, a much higher class. One has only to read a 
page of Hardy, a page of Meredith, and a page of 
Harold Frederic, to be certain of this. Like Richard 
Harding Davis, he was a man of the world rather 
than a man of letters. The profound loneliness and 
cloistral mental activity of Hardy and Meredith were 
not for him. Like so many men who have been 
trained in journalism, and who have sight rather than 
insight, he could write well on almost any subject 
that he chose, but your really great writer writes not 
because he chooses a subject, but because the subject 
chooses and dominates him. Harold Frederic had 
great talent. Hardy and Meredith have genius. 
There's the difference. But, oh, the difference ! 



XX. W. L. GEORGE 

WHY does an author become popular r Why 
should W. L. George, whose first book, 
A Bed of Roses, was published but eleven 
years ago, have had so good a " press " in America ? 
Why should he have been interviewed at greater 
length than other Englishmen who visit the United 
States, and talk about the Manhattan sky-line, the 
elevators, the sky-scrapers, and their own books ? I 
am interested in these questions, because W. L. 
George is by way of being a new reputation to me. 

When I came to America in 191 7, I had not read 
any of his books, and I had only, so far as I knew, 
seen him once. That was at an annual meeting of 
the Authors Society in London. He made a fight- 
ing speech, and I said to myself — " Good ! He 
treats literature seriously.'' 

There are so many American authors to consider 
that I had almost forgotten about W. L. George, 
when, at a dinner given by the Drama League to 
John Drinkwater, a young woman, who told me 
she came from Missouri, began to ply me with 
questions about W. L. George. I informed her that 
I was old-fashioned, that he was a new man, and that 
I had no information about him : after a pause I 
said, " Why are you so interested in him ? " She 
answered, " Oh, he is a feminist, and takes women 
seriously." But I found that she was only familiar 

118 



U . L. George 119 

with his novels. She had not read Woman and To- 
morrow, or The Intelligence of Woman. 

He chose for the subject of his first lecture in New 
York, " Love and Marriage. " He dined with me 
at a club a few days before the lecture and I begged 
him to change the subject of his address, on the 
grounds that no one wanted to hear a man talk on 
u Love and Marriage." He disagreed, and said, 
" What subject do you suggest that I should lecture 
upon ? " I answered, " As you have been here for 
three weeks why not ' What I Think of America f l n 
" Is not that a rather dangerous topic ? " he asked. 
" Americans, I am told, are very sensitive." " May- 
be," I replied, " but you can say anything you like 
if only you will say it humorously, and wrap up your 
comment in a joke. Then you can be as caustic 
and critical as you desire." 

He did not change t 1 ^ : subject of his lecture. It 
was a crowded and attentive audience ; they fol- 
lowed his thought and took every point ; and, at 
the conclusion, the chairman (the editor of Vanity 
Fair) announced that Mr. George would be happy 
to answer questions. Then from all over the hall 
and balcony inquirers bobbed up, and many of the 
questions dealt with points in his novels ; chiefly the 
dispositions and actions of his heroines. When the 
lecture was over I hastened to the reception room to 
retract all I had said about " Love and Marriage " 
not being an attractive topic. " You were right, 
and I was wrong." He took my apology comfort- 
ably. Like Arnold Bennett he does not argue : 
like him he waits sanguinely until his opponent adopts 
his point of view. 



120 More Authors and I 

No one at the lecture had anything to say about 
his thick volume called Engines of Social Progress, 
which deals with such subjects as " Small Holdings," 
" Housing Schemes " and " Co-operation " ; no 
one mentioned France in the Twentieth Century, 
with its chapters on "The French Woman" and 
" Marriage " ; no one asked questions relating to his 
valuable volume on the model town built at Port 
Sunlight by the proprietor of " Sunlight Soap " ; 
no one had a word to say on his study of Anatole 
France, which, in my opinion, is one of his best 
pieces of work. It is by his novels that he has 
caught the lecture public and the reading public, 
and I have no doubt that this is precisely what he 
meant to do. Here again is a similarity between 
W. L. George and Arnold Bennett. Neither leaves 
anything to chance, or to the inspiration of the 
moment. Each makes a literary plan of campaign, 
and keeps to it ; each regards literature rather as a 
business ; certainly as a means toward ripe living 
and advancement. 

In my analysis W. L. George is not primarily a 
novelist* He is a student of sociology, a garnerer of 
facts, an examiner of data, and I do not believe 
that, in his heart, he is more interested in the con- 
dition of women than in the condition of prisoners. 
When I last met him he had spent the afternoon 
talking with the prisoners in Sing Sing, and, of all 
the conversational hares I started, the condition of 
prisoners in American jails was the one that he 
followed with the most eagerness. His is a practical 
mind, that likes dealing with and probing actuali- 
ties. To a reporter, on the day after he had reached 



W. L. George 121 

New York, he said, " I am not one of those people 
who are interested in old ruins, and Rembrandts and 
cathedrals, I am interested in machinery and con- 
crete ways of doing things, and vital things in 
life. I don't care at all to visit the Metropolitan 
Museum here, but I should like to visit your 
law-courts." 

People have different views as to what are the 
" vital things in life " ; but Mr. George has no doubt 
about what he thinks they are. I imagine that he 
would be much more interested in the method of 
carrying on a successful five-cent store, than in the 
provenance of the most adorably doubtful Primitive 
picture ever painted. He would be very impatient 
and snappy if he were obliged to argue at length with 
Ford Madox Hueffer as to the proper preparation 
for writing a Great Book ; but he would be delighted 
to balance with an architect the claims of a single- 
material house against a two-material house at Port 
Sunlight. This being so, do you not think it clever 
of him to have devoted so much thought to fiction ? 
for people will read a novel when they will not read a 
sociological book ; and when a man wants to make 
use of his knowledge it is more advantageous to 
employ it in The Second Blooming than in Labour and 
Housing ; and in Caliban and The Strangers* Wedding 
than in Dramatic Actualities and Literary Chapters. 
In the last-named book he studies and considers the 
drama and literature with the same unimpassioned 
detachment with which he studies love, marriage, 
the French temperament and cheap cottages. His 
writings lack charm. I think that he is not interested 
in charm. 



122 More Autfwrs and I 

In The Little Beloved, called in the United King- 
dom The Making of an Englishman (why do some 
authors have two titles for their books, one for 
England, the other for America ?), he depicts the 
process whereby " a typical French youth, mercurial, 
passionate, spectacular, is transformed into a staid 
and stolid English householder and husband. ?? 
That, without the adjectives, for they describe the 
character in the book, is his case. He was born in 
France, he was educated there, he attended a French 
university, and it was only after being shaped into a 
Frenchman that he became, by choice, an English- 
man. His knowledge of France and Frenchmen 
explains why his little book on Anatole France is so 
good, and perhaps that is the reason why he is quite 
as much interested in women as in housing. 

He has written part of his autobiography succinctly 
in Who's Who. Really, I must quote it : " Educated 
successively as an analytical chemist, an engineer, a 
barrister, a soldier, and a business man ; having 
proved a failure at all these trades, took to journalism 
about 1907." 

His latest novel is Ursula Trent. The one before 
was Caliban, a study of a " Superman " in journal- 
ism. I was immensely interested in the opening 
chapters, describing the school days and home life of 
the " Superboy," very well observed, and analyzed 
with energy and sound common sense ; but when 
the " Superman " begins to operate, the author's 
grasp relaxes, my interest waned, and I felt that Mr. 
George has not diagnosed the " Superman " with the 
industry and intensity with which he has analyzed 
the French temperament and woman. 



W. L. George 123 

Yesterday I bat down to make a further stud) of 
his book on The Intelligence of Woman (I love to 
learn things), but as I was beginning to master the 
chapter on " Feminist Intentions," someone in the 
next room began singing " Phyllis Is My Only Joy," 
and I forgot all about the book. 



XXL SIR PHILIP GIBBS 

SIR PHILIP GIBBS is one of the few people 
whom the war has blessed. Spiritually and 
physically he suffered ; but as a man and as a 
writer he has gained enormously from the part he 
played in the conflict. His utterances have weight. 
When he was lecturing in Washington an American 
of eminence said to me, " Hs is now a Voice." 

What were his assets ? Why among the multi- 
tude of correspondents did his work stand out ? Why, 
in America and England, did people welcome his 
articles, read them, discuss them and regard the 
special correspondence of this Englishman as some- 
thing separate and apart from the other columns 
cabled from the seat of war ? His style is not vivid 
nor dramatic ; he was given no special advantages ; 
he did not indulge in limelight " scoops " or 
" stories " ; by temperament and physique he was 
most unsuited to the ardours of the campaign. Why, 
then, did his war articles, books and lectures have so 
great a success with the English-speaking peoples ? 
Because the heart of the people is right. Because 
the people saw in him a man who felt, and who had 
sympathy for all mankind ; who told the truth ; who 
suffered and sorrowed ; but who never allowed what 
he saw, heard and reported to obscure his inner 
vision that somehow, in the end, the right would 
come right, and the smooth would emerge from the 

124 



Sir Philip Gibbs 125 

rough. Such a passage as the following, taken 
from his book, The Battles of the Sommc, endeared 
him to his readers. " I was only a looker-on and 
reporter of other men's courage and sacrifice — a 
miserable game, rather wearing to the nerves and 
spirit." 

He and I have met many times. Two of the 
encounters stand out : an interval of ten years 
between them. In those ten years he has made 
good, has reached the top of his profession — descrip- 
tive reporting — the most enjoyable method, in my 
opinion, of earning a living, and spending one's 
days. That is, if you arc given a free hand, and are 
not edited. 

Our first meeting was in Westminster, in 191 1, 
in a queer, delightful twin house in the purlieus of 
the Abbey, and under the shadow of the Mother of 
Parliaments. There I lived, and there one day a card 
was brought to me bearing the inscription, " Philip 
Gibbs, Daily Chronicle." He had called to inter- 
view me on the subject of Rembrandt apropos of a 
very important exhibition of Rembrandts that was 
being held at Amsterdam. I have forgotten what 
questions Philip Gibbs addressed to me ; I have 
forgotten what I said to him. It does not matter, 
because there is only one thing ever to be said about 
Rembrandt — that in insight, intensity, and spiritual 
communication he is the greatest artist of the world. 
But I have not forgotten the look of Philip Gibbs 
that day in 191 1. Slight, short, pale, modest, I see 
him now, standing against the window, not taking 
notes, quiet, self-controlled, intent on the business 
in hand, watchful, anxiously eager to draw from the 



126 More Authors and I 

interview all he could of interest and information 
for the paper he represented. 

He was also standing the last time I saw him in 
America ; but the environment was very different. 
I saw him from the top balcony of Carnegie Hall, 
standing alone in the middle of the platform, his 
face the colour of his shirt-front, heard him speak 
fairly and temperately on the Irish question, heard 
him meet the verbal assaults of the Sinn Feiners with 
the composure and mild, mystical remonstrance with 
which he met the German bullets. And I was a 
witness of his triumph, perhaps the crowning suc- 
cess, so far, of his career. Unmoved by the inter- 
ruptions, sad, not angry at their violence, as he 
approached the end of his lecture, he said (it was 
almost an aside), " I believe the great majority of 
Americans are friendly to the British." He was 
about to continue, but he paused for the simple 
reason that the audience broke into cheers : he did 
not continue because the cheers changed into 
shouts : he was still silent because the vast audience 
had risen, and was hurrahing and waving hands 
and handkerchiefs. Unmoved was Philip Gibbs, 
that is, he showed no emotion ; but his mind was 
working quickly, and I fancy he determined, in- 
stantly, to cut out his prepared peroration. When 
the cheering ceased he said simply, " You have 
given your answer. Thank you." 

It was most effective. Indeed, I think that I 
have never heard a more dramatic and forcible ending 
to a speech. Philip Gibbs, who looks so gentle, has 
courage and the instinct that is given to the pure 
of heart to do the right thing at the right moment. 



Sir Philip Gibbs 127 

We met many times between those two episodes. 
Gradually he became a figure in " the Street of 
Adventure " which is Fleet Street. He had worked 
his way up the journalistic ladder ; had written 
novels ; works of history ; had been literary editor 
of great daily newspapers ; had turned his hand to 
all sorts of literary activities. So the time passed 
pleasantly till 191 2, when the Balkan war broke out, 
and he was appointed by the Daily Chronicle war 
correspondent with the Bulgarian armies. H. W. 
Nevinson was there : he looked Gibbs over and 
wondered : he beheld " the sort of dreamy youth 
who would always leave his kit behind, and never 
know how to get himself a square meal." With a 
laugh Nevinson has since confessed how entirely he 
was mistaken. The " dreamy youth " was always 
alert, ready, quick, and with an amazing intuition, as 
when, a few years later, he alone saw through the 
humbug of Cook, the " Arctic explorer." 

Philip Gibbs did well in the Balkan trouble, so 
well that when the Great War broke out in 191 4 his 
paper, the Daily Chronicle, at once sent him over 
to France. It was said of him, I believe I said it, 
that he slipped across to France in his Fleet Street 
blue serge suit with a handbag and his walking- 
stick. He told me with a smile that this was near 
the truth, although not quite accurate. Now and 
again during those awful years he appeared for brief 
intervals in his old Fleet Street haunts, always quiet, 
always with more in his head than he cared to 
express, always preparing to start forth again into 
the confusion, folly and fatuity of war. 

I read his novel, The Street of Adventure, a few 



128 More Authors and I 

years ago. It has been called " a true picture of 
Fleet Street " and contains, under assumed names, 
the history of The Tribune newspaper. His novels 
are bright and interesting, but I think that fiction is 
not his metier. Nor do I think that such a clever 
book as People of Destiny : Americans as I Saw Them 
at Home and Abroad fully expresses him. The book 
by him that will live is Now It Can Be Told, a classic, 
in which he resumes and retells all he thought, and 
saw, and felt in the Great War. 

A man of character, he resigned the dazzling posi- 
tion he had reached on the Daily Chronicle because 
he could not agree with the Irish policy of that 
journal. 

His pen will always be on the side of right and 
justice. There is work ahead for Philip Gibbs. 
He will be equal to it and — something more. That 
is his way. He looks forward. One of his recent 
articles is called " The Social Revolution in English 
Life." Here is a sentence. " Though I see the 
gravity of all this and its darkness, I believe that 
England will pull through and carry on. There is 
in English character still an intuitive, inarticulate 
wisdom." 



XXII. GEORGE GISSING 

IN 191 2, a book called The Private Life of Henry 
Maitlavd, by Morley Roberts, was published. 
This volume was sent to me for review by 
the literary editor of the London Daily Chronicle. 
" I want a signed column and a quarter," he wrote, 
'"for a ' Published To-day ' notice. You will know 
how to treat it." 

That was all very well : he knew that I should be 
in considerable doubt as to how to treat it, and he 
also knew that if the review were indiscreet, the 
blame would fall upon the reviewer. Well, I am 
not the first good man who has had to put up a 
struggle against adversity. I accepted the responsi- 
bility, read the book, reflected, and decided to tell 
the truth. That was an excellent idea, and it worked 
well. Nobody was hurt ; nobody was upset ; and I 
only smiled when literary friends chided me for 
telling the truth. I smiled because they seemed 
to regard the truth as something untoward and 
odd. 

George Gissing, the only person who might have 
been hurt by this scrap of truth telling, was beyond 
praise, blame, or discoveries : he had passed away 
at St. Jean de Luz on December 28, 1903 : his 
literary reputation is secure : Frederick Harrison, 
H. G. Wells, Thomas Seccombe, Frank Swinnerton 
have written enthusiastically on him ; his secret is 
k 129 



130 More Authors and I 

now known. And .at least one of his books, By the 
Ionian Sea, is regarded as a classic. 

Be patient, reader. I dwell upon this secret 
because the consciousness of it darkened Gissing's 
days, made him into a lonely, brooding man, and 
perhaps explains his elusive desire, shown so plainly 
in By the Ionian Sea, to escape from the present and 
lose himself in a scholarly appreciation of the past. 
His secret was, that at school he had stolen small 
sums of money, books and coats from his fellow- 
students, not for any personal indulgence, but to 
supply the financial claims made upon him through 
an action — kindly philanthropic, quixotic even — in 
which he allowed himself to be involved. 

This sad story was known in literary circles, and 
to his friends, who were quite aware that most of 
Gissing's troubles in life were due to this compas- 
sionate, amatory strain in him. He found it so easy 
to entangle himself, and so hard to untie, or even 
loosen the knots. His biographers usually glide over 
this secret of his youth, and so are unable to give a 
clue to the life of this recluse, who, even when one 
met him in the haunts of writers, always seemed to 
be hovering on the outskirts of companionship. 

In 1 91 2 his old friend, Morley Roberts, who had 
been at school with Gissing, and who knew the 
whole story of his trouble from the inside, came 
upon the scene with The Private Life of Henry M ait- 
land, which all of us who were acquainted with 
Gissing and with Roberts knew, with disguised names 
and places, was the straightforward story of the 
Private and Public Life of George Gissing. There 
was no doubt about it. Every literary journalist 



George Gissing 131 

was aware of the story. Morley Roberts made no 
secret of the enterprise, and had this not been so I 
could check up incidents in the book with incidents 
in Gissing' s life. I even knew the real name of the 
school. It was Owen's College, Manchester, and a 
friend who had been a student there with Gissing 
and Roberts had, long before, told me the whole 
direly trivial tale. And I knew, too, that Gissing 
had been diverted by his friends to America, and 
that he had made good in New York, Boston, and 
Chicago. 

So when The Private Life oj Henry Maitland came 
to me for review I had to make a decision. I decided 
to tell the truth. " Henry Maitland is George 
Gissing," I said, explained how and why, and the 
literary editor of the Daily Chronicle was so pleased 
that he sent me other difficult books to review and 
repeated his pleasant phrase — " You will know how 
to treat them." 

That was in 191 2. 

It was curious to read not long ago in the 
" Literary Queries " column of a New York daily 
newspaper this appeal — " Can any reader help me 
to find out what stories were contributed to The 
Chicago Tribune by George Gissing while he was on 
the staff of that paper ? " On reading this I referred 
to The Private Life of Henry Maitland to find Morley 
Roberts saying, " I think it would be very interest- 
ing if some American student of Maitland would 
turn over the files of The Chicago Tribune in the 
years 1878 and 1879 anc ^ disinter the work he did 
there." 

Morley Roberts also says : " To me it seems that 



132 More Authors and I 

he [Maitland] should never have written fiction at 
all, although he did it so admirably." I entirely 
agree with Roberts. I have read most, if not all, 
of Gissing's novels, and I shall never read another. 
They are too grey, too depressing. They have no 
consciousness of the Stars and the Open Gate. 
Even Feranilda, a story of Roman and Goth, w T hich 
Frederick Harrison considers the " best and most 
original work of this really brilliant scholar," bores 
me. You find the real Gissing, I think, in the 
beginning of Sleeping Fires — 

" The rain was over. As he sat reading, Langley 
saw the page illumined with a flood of sunshine, 
which warmed his face and hand. For a few minutes 
he read on, then closed his Aristophanes with a 
laugh — faint echo of the laughter of 2000 years ago." 

And you find the real Gissing, too, in his second 
best book, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, 
say in this passage — 

" I read much less than I used to do ; I think 
much more. Yet what is the use of thought which 
can no longer serve to direct life ? Better, perhaps, 
to read and read incessantly, losing one's futile self 
in the activity of other minds." 

Here is another cry from " Henry Ryecroft," 
who is, of course, George Gissing. 

" I had in me the making of a scholar. With 
leisure and tranquillity of mind, I should have 
amassed learning. Within the walls of a college, I 
should have lived so happily, so harmlessly, my 
imagination ever busy with the old world. . . . 
Through all my battlings and miseries I have always 
lived more in the past than in the present." 



George Gissing 133 

To all this there is onl) one answer. Nobody 
but himself hindered Gissing from being a scholar, 
from dwelling within the walla of a college, from 
amassing knowledge and living in the past. At 
school and at Owen's College he showed great 
promise, he won prizes and scholarships, anything 
was in his grasp; he threw all away, and never 
ceased to lament. 

His best book I have left to the last — By the Ionian 
Sea, which he calls " Notes of a ramble in Southern 
Italy." I have read this solemn, sad and wistful 
chant again and again, never tiring, and I have 
lately re-read it in the delicate edition published by 
Mr. jYlosher of Maine. In a Foreword Mr. Mosher 
says — 

" It has long been in my heart to bring out By 
the Ionian Sea in the series including Earthwork 
Out of Tuscany, Studies in the Renaissance, and 
Roses of Pa? stum ; for I do not know of four other 
volumes that could be read compelling our attention 
by such associated loveliness of subject and of 
style." 

By the Ionian Sea is a book to read and linger over, 
chapter by chapter from Paola to Reggio, and there, 
on the last page is his valediction — unhappy, happy 
George Gissing. 

" Alone and quiet, I heard the washing of the 
waves ; I saw the evening fall on cloud-wreathed 
Etna, the twinkling lights come forth upon Scylla 
and Charybdis ; and, as I looked my last toward the 
Ionian Sea, I wished it were mine to wander end- 
lessly amid the silence of the ancient world, to-day 
and all its sounds forgotten." 



!34 More Authors and I 

I see him a grave, remote, supple, inward-peering 
figure, as in William Rothenstein's drawing, wander- 
ing for ever through silent, classical, dateless land- 
scapes—lakes, hills, and broken temples— such as 
Emil Menard has painted. 







XXIII. JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS 

WE were driving across Hyde Park on the wide, 
twisty, leafy road that runs from Kensing- 
ton to Bayswater. As we left the bridge 
that crosses the Serpentine and approached the 
Magazine, I saw in a hollow to the right, which is a 
kind of natural amphitheatre, a vast concourse of 
people — probably 5000. They were standing and 
reclining in a circle : all were looking down upon a 
stage ; but the boards were of green grass, and the 
stage seats were logs of wood, as in the Forest of 
Arden, and the dressing-rooms were tents ; and 
there was an orchestra playing a merry, lilting air 
(women performers) and a chorus, half a hundred I 
should think, clad in the kind of woodland raiment 
that Robin Hood and his Merry Men wore ; and all 
this within sight of Westminster Towers, and close 
to the motor buses and cabs that rush along Ken- 
sington Road. 

" A Pastoral Play in Hyde Park," said Belinda. 
" England is moving with the times." 

I did not answer her immediately because I had 
caught sight on the green stage, surrounded by 
ancient oaks, of two or three queer figures, neither 
men nor animals, yet looking something like men, 
and something like animals. I am, as you know, 
rather quick, and the advantage of Belinda as a 

i35 



136 More Authors and I 

companion is that I can say anything to her, so I 
remarked, with a laugh, " Looks to me like old Brer 
Fox and Brer Rabbit." " Don't be silly," said 
Belinda, " and do tell the man to hurry. It's 
twenty-five minutes to eight, and dinner is at half- 
past seven. You are incorrigible." 

I made no reply because I had been ready in 
excellent time — I always am — but as being late 
for dinner is a tragedy, I said no more about Brer 
Fox and Brer Rabbit — forgot all about them, and 
regretted that I had made such a silly remark, for 
what connection can there be between Brer Rabbit 
and Brer Fox, and Hyde Park at the height of the 
London season ? 

The odd thing is that I was right, beautifully, 
candidly, and consequentially right as Henry James 
might say. For the next morning the principal 
newspapers had long and charming accounts of the 
performance headed " Brer Rabbit in Hyde Park : 
Brer Rabbit and Mr. Fox, New Setting for an Old 
Story," and one of the reports ran, " The most 
beautifully appointed theatre in England was thrown 
open yesterday afternoon and evening, and the play 
was Brer Rabbit. What more fitting stage could 
be found for it ? Joel Chandler Harris was a genius 
in his way." 

What memories have I of him ? Of himself — 
nothing : of his books — much. That is as it should 
be. And yet " Uncle Remus " has been for years so 
companionable and delightful a person that I seem 
to know him better than many people whom I meet 
constantly. Uncle Remus : His Songs and His Say- 
ings (1880), Nights with Uncle Remus (1883), Uncle 



Joel Chandler Harris 137 

Remus aiu Friends (1897), Told by Uncle 

Remus (1906). I know that Uncle Rcmu- was 
invented by Joel Chandler 1 1 arris, hut one alwi 
thinks of them as one and the same person. Why 
not ? 

Didn't the Foa never catch the Rabbit, Uncle 
Remus ? ' asked the little boy, 

" * He come mighty nigh it, honey, sho's you 
bawn — Brer Fox did. One day attcr Brer Rabbit 
fool 'im wid dat calamus root, Brer Fox went ter 
wuk en got 'im some tar, en mix it wid some turpen- 
tine, en fix up a contrapshun what he call a Tar- 
Baby. . . : 

" k It's a mighty purty tale ' (Cinderella, which 
the little boy had told him), said Uncle Remus. 
* It's so purty dat you dunner whedder ter b'lieve 
it er not. Yit I speck it's so, keze one time in forty 
lev'm hundred matters will turn out right een' 
upper ds.' " 

Uncle Remus and his talking animals have passed 
into the language. They are the parents of numer- 
ous books in this kind and I do not suppose that 
anyone, not even Kipling, has worked this genre 
better than Joel Chandler Harris. How much is 
his own invention, and how much he gleaned and 
adapted from the old Negro folk-lore is one of those 
questions that can never be adequately answered. 
He has been called " The ,/Esop of Georgia," and 
Brer Rabbit is a household word throughout the 
English-speaking world. I remember a violent dis- 
cussion between two Dons as to whether it w T as Tar- 
Baby or Brer Fox who lay low and said nuthin'. 
They should have been better informed. Every 






138 More Authors and I 

child knows that. " Tar-Baby ain't sayin' nuthin', 
en Brer Fox, he lay low. . . . Brer Rabbit keep 
on axin' 'im, en de Tar-Baby she keep on sayin' 
nuthin'. . . ." And I remember a noble lord, in 
a 'political speech, adapting the brier-patch story to 
some burning question of the day. " Den Brer 
Rabbit talk mighty 'umble. ' I don't keer wat 
you do wid me, Brer Fox,' sezee, ' so you don't 
fling me in dat brier-patch. . . .' " Then the 
climax. " ' Bred en bawn in a brier-patch, Brer 
Fox, bred en bawn in a brier-patch ! ' en wid 
dat he skip out des ez lively ez a cricket in de 
embers." 

Joel Chandler Harris (1 848-1908) lived most of 
his life at Atlanta, Georgia. Apart from his books 
his journalistic career seems to have been spent on 
the Atlanta Constitution, of which he rose to be 
editor. His recreations are recorded thus : " Think- 
ing of things and tending his roses. Lived in the 
suburb, where he had a comfortable home built to a 
veranda, on a five-acre lot full of birds, flowers, 
children and collar ds." A jolly, understanding, 
sympathetic man ! 

I learnt, with joy, that " Brer Rabbit and Mr. 
Fox," a Musical Frolic by Mabel Dearmer, with 
music by Martin Shaw, was to be repeated on the 
following Saturday, and that these Hyde Park enter- 
tainments, " Plays for the People," are planned and 
carried out by a society called the " League of Arts," 
which has, wonderful to relate, obtained permission 
from His Majesty's Office of Works to perform open- 
air plays and operas in the natural amphitheatre by 
the Serpentine. 



Joel Chandler Harris 139 

Would you like to see a list of the characters ? 
To many in England and America they will recall 
happy memories. 

Brer Bear Mr. Kildec 

Brer Fox Miss Meadows 

Brer Rabbit Miss Motts 

Brer Tarrvpin Miss Lucy 

Brer Bullfrog Miss Tilda 

Miss Goose Miss Nancy 

King Deer Sindy Ann 
King Deer's Daughter Rab 

Mr. Man Tobc 

Miss Janey Molly Cotton Tail 

The scene is — A Woodland Glade. For two hours 
w r e were with Uncle Remus of Atlanta, Georgia — 
he who lived in a five-acre lot full of birds, flowers, 
children and collards — on, on to the end of the 
frolic, with Brer Rabbit saying (see the Book of 
Words), " No, no, ladies, Brer Rabbit's nobody — de 
littlest of all de animals — dis (pointing to Uncle 
Remus) am de author of de play." 

Then a little wind rose in the trees, and the still, 
clear July night began to settle down upon London. 
But I did not hear the hoot of the motors, did not 
see the policeman on point duty rigidly holding back 
the crowd, for I was seeing a sleepy little boy sitting 
with Uncle Remus in a veranda in Georgia, and the 
little boy is saying — 

" The Bear didn't catch the Rabbit, then ? " 

And Uncle Remus answers — 

" Jump up fum dar, honey. I ain't got no 



140 More Authors and I 

time fer ter be settin' yer proppin' 70' eyeleds 
open." 

From Georgia to London ! From London to 
Georgia ! In an intonation, in the twinkling of an 
eye, imagination leaps the miles. 



XXIV. W. H. HUDSON 

SOME years ago on a walk through Kent, I ealled 
upon a critic-naturalist who had built himself 
a back-to-thc-land house in the least spoiled 
and most inaccessible spot of southern England. 
We were standing at the edge of his rough but- 
reasoned garden, which rambles off into a wood, and 
I was talking of Tennyson's knowledge of nature, 
and slowly becoming aware that my Thoreau-like 
friend was not listening to me. He said, " Oh/' 
and " Indeed/' and " Surely " ; but his attention 
w -as with his eyes, which were fixed on a tall, sturdy, 
free-moving figure, meandering around a pond, 
visible through the wood. Sometimes this lonely 
individual would stoop and gaze intently into the 
still water, pick something out and examine it ; 
then he would rise from his haunches and resume 
his slow, peering ramble around the insignificant 
pond. 

I passed from Tennyson to make a remark or two 
about the latest volume in the Pseudonym Library, 
but my friend still continued to give me but half 
his attention. xA.t last I said petulantly — even 
philosophers are petulant sometimes — " What's the 
matter ? Why does your mind wander ? What are 
you looking at ? " 

Still with his eves on the pond he answered, 
c; That's W. H. Hudson. He's studying newts. 

141 



142 More Authors and I 

Hudson is a great man." Then he looked a little 
pathetically at me, and his look seemed to say, 
" You're a little man. That is why I am giving my 
attention to Hudson." 

Would you believe it, that rural episode set me 
slightly against Hudson. I was young. My friend 
the critic-naturalist was one of a coterie who, as the 
years passed, adopted the role of a W. H. Hudson 
admiration society. For a decade and more he had 
been neglected by the general public, and this little 
coterie, which plumed itself upon being wiser and 
more perceptive than the general, talked up and 
wrote up Hudson, and hailed him as a Great Man 
until I became as tired of hearing him called Great, 
as the Athenians were of hearing Aristides called 
Just. I feel this way about Joseph Conrad, whom 
it is now the fashion to extol extremely. Of course 
I should like such a thing to happen to myself ; but 
I, like most readers, prefer to form my own judg- 
ments about authors. 

I do not blame Hudson for the worship of his 
admirers. He is the most modest and retiring of 
men. You rarely meet him at functions ; he pre- 
fers nature to man, and he had such a long period of 
neglect that a little overpraise will not hurt him. 
But has he been overpraised ? That question has 
been troubling me during the past week, which I 
have spent reconsidering Hudson. 

I have only seen him twice — at the newt pond, 
and in 1907 when he was writing The Land's End : 
a Naturalist's Impressions in West Cornwall. We 
met under curious conditions on the bleak hills 
above Zennor, near the Land's End, and I eyed him 



W. H. Hudson 143 

with interest, because I was also writing a book on 
Cornwall. As I am neither a hawk, nor a newt, nor 
an armadillo he did not pay any attention to me. 
We passed each other gruffly, he studying — gulls and 
robins, I — stone circles and cromlechs. When his 
book appeared the last paragraph made me rather 
angry. He seems to resent the acquisition of the 
Rokeby " Venus " by Velasquez for the National 
Gallery, because the money, he thinks, might have 
been better spent in making the Land's End a 
National possession. That is like mayors in America 
who resent fine buildings and the acquisition of 
fine pictures, because the money could be spent on 
bathing beaches and homes for the poor. 

I do not think The Land's End one of his best 
books ; but as the years passed I began to realize 
that, in spite of the overpraise of his admirers, 
Hudson is a beautiful and exceptional writer, with 
a great power of observation, and the ability to 
express himself in melodious, unaffected prose. He 
seems to write with the ease of a bird singing, and 
his thoughts are his own thoughts : always lonely, 
yet happy. I realized that I must write about 
him. 

That adventure was forced on me when I read 
this in The Dial by Ford Madox Hueffer — " We 
wanted to write, I suppose, as only Mr. W. H. 
Hudson writes — as simply as the grass grows." " Ho, 
ho ! " I said. " Here is another admirer, a new mem- 
ber of the coterie. What is there about Hudson 
that makes critics stand on their toes and shout r 
Shall I be doing it before I am through with 
him ? " 



144 More Authors and I 

The next thing was to read Green Mansions, which 
my bookseller told me had gone through nine print- 
ings since 191 6. So I bought it. I am very human. 
I took it away into the country, and read it in 
bed in the morning, and under a tree in the 
afternoon. 

It is introduced with a Foreword by John Gals- 
worthy which, if I were in the habit of using slang, 
I should say made me " sit up." The praise of 
Hudson of the others is as nothing compared with 
that of Galsworthy. Here are a few sentences — 
" As a simple narrator he is well-nigh unsurpassed ; 
as a stylist he has few, if any, living equals. ... Of 
all living authors — now that Tolstoy has gone I could 
least dispense with W. H. Hudson. ... A very- 
great writer : and — to my thinking — the most 
valuable our Age possesses." 

I enjoyed Green Mansions immensely, but it would 
have pleased me better if it had not been in the form 
of fiction. I believe Hudson when he tells me his 
own thoughts, observations and reflections ; but he 
does not convince me when he uses Mr. Abel as a 
mouthpiece. In a word I want Hudson pure, 
not Hudson clothed with the stock garments of 
fiction. 

So with The Purple Land and A Crystal Age. To 
me they have an air of unreality that is so perfectly 
absent from Hudson's personal books. Theodore 
Roosevelt adds himself to the list of Hudson's 
admirers in " An Introductory Note " to The Purple 
Land — " His writings come in that very small class 
of books which deserve the title of literature," and 
so on. And Barrie says — " It is one of the choicest 



W. H. Hudson 145 

things of our latter-day literature.*' They all love 
Hudson. 

Roosevelt also praises " those delightful booW 
Idle Days in Patagonia and The Naturalist in La 
Plata. There I am entirely with him : such as 
these are the real Hudson. When I read his books 
about nature (he loves everything, even snakes and 
spiders) I feel myself being drawn into the Hudson 
coterie. I want to express my gratitude, and to 
praise him. 

I go through his nature books and re-read the 
passages I have marked. This to children in Hamp- 
shire Days — " Pet nothing, persecute nothing " ; 
this in Nature in Dozvnland — " Here, sitting on the 
dry grass with my face to the wind, I spent two or 
three hours in gazing at the thistle-down " ; this 
from Adventures Among Birds — " I could hear the 
wind in the bulrushes, miles on miles of dark polished 
stems, tufted with ruddy brown ; that low, mysteri- 
ous sound is to me the most fascinating of all the 
many voices of the wind." 

A remote, wandering man is W. H. Hudson, here 
to-day, gone to-morrow, off to some new adven- 
ture with nature, leaving no postal address. Little 
is known about the events of his life, little has he 
told ; but he has said that he has had no career — 
" just a drifting along," and this — " All the interest- 
ing part of my life ended when I ceased to be a boy, 
and my autobiography ends at fifteen." 

That wonderful boyhood is told in Far Away and 
Long Ago, the story of his early life on the South 
American pampas, and his awakening to the eternal 
interest and endless consolation of nature. This to 



146 More Authors and I 

me is his most beautiful and interesting book, this 
story of his wonderful boyhood. 

Come to think of it, I was happy in my two 
encounters with this naturalist, for on each occasion 
I saw him absorbed in nature — peering into the pond 
in Kent, and gazing at the gulls over Cornwall. 






XXV. A. S. M. HUTCHINSON 

BY a happy chance it was Sinclair Lewis, author 
of Main Street, who introduced me to A. S. M. 
Hutchinson, author of Ij Winter Comes. The 
significance of this episode may not be apparent 
to Oxford Dons, or Appalachian mountaineers ; 
but to a Bookman its remarkable significance is 
that one " best seller " introduced me to another 
" best seller." 

How strange it is, and how encouraging that the 
two best sellers of the day should be two such fine 
books as Main Street and If Winter Comes, one 
dealing with life in an American new, small town, 
the other in and around an old English village. 
In each the characters are real and human, and each 
book has sold, I am told, more than a quarter of a 
million copies in America, with innumerable print- 
ings in England and Canada. One who knows tells 
me that If Winter Comes may reach a sale of half a 
million copies. 

So it was interesting to see these two young 
authors together, and to find these "best sellers" 
enthusiastic about each other's work — the American 
tall, slim, blond, alert, with easy movements and 
quick eyes, noting things in a flash and directly : 
the Englishman slim, pale, reflective rather than 
alert, with the almost shy look of a man who absorbs 

i47 



148 More Authors and I 

before he expresses himself, and then obliquely 
rather than directly. He wears glasses. 

It is the literary paragraphists of the press who 
foster the interest of the public in " best sellers." 
Items detailing the number of printings, accounts 
of the presses running night and day, calculations 
of sales at the rate of " three copies a minute," make 
" good copy." For everyone is interested in 
success. No doubt the send-off of If Winter Conies 
was helped by Sir James Barrie, who wrote to the 
author : " Please let a fellow- writer congratulate 
you very heartily on If Winter Comes, the best 
novel I had read for many a day." This frank 
praise from a great and kindly fellow-worker has, 
strange to say, crept into the advertisements. 

I, in common with others, perused these para- 
graphs, and, like others, I began to wonder why 
this book should be so popular, for of a hundred 
novels published most fall flat, a few have a tolerable 
success, but here was one with a success that might 
almost be called unparalleled. I became curious 
about A. S. M. Hutchinson, and wondered if he 
was in Who's Who, 

He is. He comes of good stock — military- writing 
stock ; his father is Lieut.-Gen. H. D. Hutchinson, 
a distinguished retired Anglo-Indian soldier, and 
author of such books as Military Sketching Made 
Easy and The Campaign in Tirah, The author of 
If Winter Comes was born at Gorakpur, India, in 
1879. He was educated in Kent, at St. Lawrence 
College, Thanet ; then he studied medicine, 
abandoned it, and took to writing, the journalistic 
branch, which for beginners is the paying branch, 



A . S. M. Hutchinson 149 

worked with the Pearson firm, and became editor 
Of the Daily Graphic in 191 2. I wonder if he 
wrote the editorials that I used to admire so much 
in that bright illustrated daily. 

His experiences in the Great War made him feel 
that he never wanted to write again, but once a 
writer always a writer. Although he may have 
felt at the time that he would never write again, 
the story of If Winter Comes buried itself in his 
brain during the war days, developed itself, and 
when peace came it " suddenly demanded to be 
written. More. It wrote itself." 

The strange and happy thing about If Winter 
Comes is that there is no attempt in it to please, 
or to write down to the public. The opening 
chapter wherein the " garrulous Hapgood " is 
allowed to introduce the chief character, is of a 
kind, crabbed and oblique, that might baulk those 
novel-readers — and they are the majority — who like 
the primrose way, easy-chair method of introducing 
a character. But the passionate sincerity of the 
analysis gets hold of the reader, and he soon feels 
an intense sympathy for Mark Sabre, the hero, 
a twentieth-century example of the good man 
struggling against adversity. 

This man, this Mark Sabre, who has the habit 
" of seeing things from about twenty points of view 
instead of one," is an essential Truth-seeker who 
wars not against principalities and powers, but 
against convention, stupidity and selfishness in 
the people of his environment. Or rather they 
war against him. And they are not abstractions : 
they are not stage dummies : they are very real 



150 More Authors and I 

people, so real, so natural, the pleasant ones as well 
as the unpleasant ones, that I am inclined to think 
that Mr. Hutchinson's greatest gift is his power of 
vivid characterization, which is, of course, the hall- 
mark of all the great writers of fiction. If I were 
a preacher I would be disposed to say that the fact 
of half a million of people having read and liked 
this book is a sure sign of the rightness of the reading 
world, and a most encouraging sign of the times. 
Idealism, and the scent, unerring when it is really 
there, for righteousness is stronger to-day than 
ever. 

I must copy a passage from If Winter Comes. 
It shows the author's quick style, the flashlight of 
his revelation of character, and his tuition. 

" One evening he asked her a most extraordinary 
question, shot out of him without intending it, 
discharged out of his questing thoughts as by a 
hidden spring suddenly touched by groping fingers. 

" ' Effie, do you love God ? ' 

" Her surprise seemed to him to be more at the 
thing he had asked than at its amazing unexpected- 
ness and amazing irrelevancy. ' Why, of course I 
do, Mr. Sabre.' 

" < Why do you ? ' 

" She was utterly at a loss. * Well, "of course 
I do.' 

" He said rather sharply, ' Yes, but why ? Have 
you ever asked yourself why ? Respecting, fearing, 
trusting, that's understandable. But love, love ; 
you know what love is, don't you ? What's love 
got to do with God ? ' 

" She said in simple wonderment, as one asked 



A. S. M. Hutchinson 151 

what had the sun to do with light, or whether 
water was wet, ' Why, God is love.' 

" He stared at her." 

And we are told that " nothing of that wanting- 
something look" was ever to be seen in Effie's 
shining eyes. She had the secret of life. 

The title-page of If Winter Comes describes 
A. S. M. Hutchinson as also the author of The Happy 
Warrior, Once Aboard the Lugger, and The Clean 
Heart. I have read The Happy Warrior. It is 
a fine book, with characters in it that are Dickensian 
in their ready humour and lusty characterization ; 
but it has not the maturity or reasoned development 
of If Winter Comes. 

The Bookman magazine designed an original 
competition. It offered prizes for the best answers 
to two questions suggested by If Winter Comes. 
Mr. Hutchinson read and judged the answers. 
Has this ever happened before ? 

Publishers are naturally interested in the success 
of If Winter Comes. One of them said to me, " My 
dear sir, it means a small fortune for the author, 
and — ahem — for the publisher, and a straight run 
into success for Hutchinson's next books, and cer- 
tainly for This Freedom." 

" Would you have prophesied the success of If 
Winter Comes ? " I asked. 

He shook his head. " No one can forecast what 
the reception of a novel or a play will be ? With 
Essays it is easy." 

" Yes," I said, " with Essays it is easy." 




XXVI. FORD MADOX HUEFFER 

1HAVE not seen Ford Madox Hueffer since 
the second year of the war, when I met him, 
one Sunday afternoon, walking in Hyde Park 
with Wyndham Lewis. He told me that he had 
" joined up." As his volume of poems called 
On Heaven, and Poems written on Active Service is 
dedicated to the commander of the Welch Regi- 
ment, I presume it was the Welch Regiment that 
he joined. Without doubt he was a good soldier. 
He wrote a clever novel called The Good Soldier, 
which many people bought thinking it was the kind 
of book that Donald Hankey writes. They are 
very different. 

Ford Madox Hueffer is always having little, 
round-the-corner successes. On Heaven appeared 
in Poetry of Chicago, and Antwerp was first pub- 
lished by the " Poetry Bookshop." The book 
contains one of those " provocative prefaces " 
which Mr. Hueffer likes writing. He announces 
that vers libre is the only medium in which he can 
convey his intimate moods, and adds : " Vers libre 
is a very jolly medium in which to write and to 
read, if it be read conversationally and quietly." 
I thinks he makes verse and writes prose rather 
easily. He turns without effort from When Blood 
is 7 'heir Argument : An Analysis of Prussian Culture 
to Zeppelin Nights, a series of short stories set in 

152 



Ford Madox Hueffer 153 

every period of English history. And I have heard 
a whisper that Daniel Chaucer, author of The Simple 
Life Limited and The Nezv Humpty Dumpty, is Ford 
Madox Hueffer. A versatile man ! 

He loves to expound the art of writing and the 
art of great writers, such as Henry James, whom he 
admires immensely ; so when he takes pen in hand 
he is ready for the tripping, reasoned words. Yes, 
he likes vers libre : it enables him to make definite 
statements like this — 

" About the middle of my hrst Last Leave, 
I stood on the curb in the pitch of the night 
Waiting for the buses that didn't come 
To take me home. 

That was in Paddington. 
The soot-black night was over one like velvet, 
And one was very alone — so very alone 
In the velvet cloak of the night." 

He published his Collected Poems in 191 4, and 
if ever he issues a uniform edition of his prose works 
it will need a long, long shelf to hold them, for he 
has written many books on many subjects : he has 
written on art, criticism, topography, history, with 
gay excursions into fiction. He has also written 
Memories. 

To me his Memories arc his most interesting 
books ; and if he seems a little weary of the whole 
business, a little querulous, and disposed to think 
writing, like everything else, somewhat of a bore, 
we must not mind. It is only his way. He is 
somewhat tired of greatness and great men. He 
was nourished on them. It was not his fault. 

He is a grandson of Ford Madox Brown. The 



154 More Authors and I 

great men who congregated around that great man, 
at the great, gaunt house (pleasant enough in the 
studio) in Fitzroy Square, encircled him from baby- 
hood. Is that an advantage, or a disadvantage ? 
I know not ; but it certainly has had a marked effect 
on the life of Ford Madox Hueffer. Oh, and his 
father was Dr. Francis Hueffer, the celebrated 
musical critic of The 'Times. 

In the dedication to " My Dear Kids," his 
daughters Christine and Katherine, that prefaces 
his volume of Memories of the Pre-Raphaelite and 
Esthetic Movements, he plays amusingly, but not 
without hints of self-pity, on the drawback of being 
brought up among great men. He tells of the 
Eminent Ones who came to his grandfather's house 
and how these " Victorian great figures " always 
seemed to be twenty-five feet high, and himself, 
as his father once called him, " the patient but 
extremely stupid donkey." In this environment 
he learnt to regard himself as the most obscure 
of obscure persons. " To me life was simply not 
worth living because of the existence of Carlyle, 
of Mr. Ruskin, of Mr. Holman Hunt, of Mr. Brown- 
ing, or of the gentlemen who built the Crystal 
Palace. These people were perpetually held up 
to me as standing upon unattainable heights, and 
at the same time I was perpetually being told that 
if I could not attain these heights I might just as 
well not cumber the earth. What, then, was left 
for me ? Nothing. Simply nothing." 

The world went quietly on, and as he grew up 
he discovered that it is by no means populated with 
great Victorians, that all people are not Rossettis 



Ford Madox Hueffer 155 

and Ruskins, and that all grandfathers arc not Ford 
Madox Browns. But he has never quite overcome 
his veneration for the Eminent, and when I first 
knew him many years ago he chided me one day for 
saying something human about Henry James and 
Swinburne. " You mustn't talk about Great Men in 
that intimate way," he said, with the tired smile, half 
amusement, half petulance, that he usually employs. 

His manner is never corybantic, and when he 
told me that afternoon in Hyde Park that he had 
" joined up," he did so with the air of saying that 
he had changed houses. I have seen nothing of 
him since that day, but he came vividly before me 
when I opened The Dial and found that he had been 
invited by the editor to write his reminiscences. 
The editor asked him formally to treat seventeen 
British contemporaries, and added, as an after- 
thought — " al^o Rudyard Kipling and any of les 
jeunes that you like." 

That gave Fordie (thus his grandfather called 
him, and I maintain that he has not yet quite grown 
up) his chance. He begins his reminiscences thus — 
" It is twenty-two years and six months since, at 
Michaelmas, 1897, I received a letter from Air. 
Conrad, asking me to collaborate with him." Mr. 
Conrad has yet to explain why he chose Mr. Hueffer. 
Henley may have had something to do with it. 

Conrad was not then a great man, but he was 
shaping for one, so you see how the society of the 
Great pursues the grandson of Ford Madox Brown. 
That afternoon when I met him in Hyde Park he 
was walking with Wyndham Lewis. 

The collaboration resulted, as everyone knows, 



156 More Authors and I 

in Romance and The Inheritors, not outstanding 
books ; indeed Mr. Hueffer says frankly — " I fancy 
that neither book has any artistic value at all." 
What then was the purpose of the collaboration ? 
I suppose to teach Conrad English, for at that time, 
on his own confession, he thought in Polish, expressed 
himself in French, and only with difficulty " ren- 
dered his thus-worded French thoughts and images 
in English." Mr. Hueffer was sure that he under- 
stood the art of expression in words. Has he not 
said — " I am alone among English-born writers 
to bother my head primarily about the ' how ' of 
writing " ? You perceive that Mr. Hueffer has 
quite overcome his Fitzroy Square timidity and 
self-depression. You must read this first chapter 
of his Memoirs ; how he and Conrad studied Flau- 
bert, Flaubert, Flaubert and, buried " in rural 
greennesses," had endless discussions on how to 
write. " I think that I was most preoccupied with 
the expression of fine shades ; Conrad's unceasing, 
search in those days was for a new form of novel. 
But I do not believe that there were in the England 
of those days any two other people whose whole 
minds and whose unceasing endeavours were so 
absolutely given to that one problem of expression 
between man and man which is the end of all 
conscious literary art." 

Of the many books that Ford Madox Hueffer 
has written I like best, after his Memories, the 
volumes on art, and on places, such as The Soul of 
London and Engla?id and the English, That romantic 
novel, The Half Moon, which begins at Rye, in 
Sussex, and ends with Henry Hudson sailing up 



Ford Madox Hueffer 157 

to Albany, might have been a great romance. Does 
it fail because the author is convinced that the 
manner of literature is so much more important 
than the matter ? 

He is a curious mixture of modesty and effrontery. 
In conversation he is modest ; with a pen in his 
hand he sometimes writes in a way that goads the 
average man to exasperation. The article in The 
Dial is a case in point. Some find it interesting 
and amusing ; others, when half-way through, fling 
the, magazine across the room. 

Obviously a man of talent and learning, some 
of his friends sometimes try to check his ambient 
air of knowing everything. Years ago when I was 
staying at Winchelsea I told a lady that I was 
about to spend the evening at the HuefTers'. " Don't 
praise Fordie to his face," she said. " It's not good 
for him." In the course of the evening someone 
sang what I thought was an Elizabethan song very 
beautifully. The strong and lyrical simplicity of 
the words were wedded to an air that suited them 
exactly. I was so charmed with the performance 
that I begged for a repetition. This was done, and I 
said, with some emotion, and not without pride in my 
perspicacity : " What a combination — Shakespeare 
and Purcell. We can do nothing like that nowadays." 

Fordie, who had been reclining on a couch, sup- 
pressed a yawn and said, " I wrote the words and the 



I read the above article to a friend of Fordie's. 
When it was finished I said : " Do you think he will 
be pleased with it ? " 



158 More Authors and I 

" Not terribly," she answered. 
" Anyhow, he gets a whole article about himself," 
I replied. 

He has now, I believe, retired into the country, 
and he has told his friends that he is through with 
literature and finds consolation in Adam's profession. 
That, I fancy, is only a mood. Once a writer, 
always a writer. 



XXVII. JAMES GIBBONS HUNEKER 

SOME years ago, a Baltimore friend sent me to 
London a copy of Promenades of an Impres- 
sionist, by James Gibbons Huneker. I read 
it with amazement. " Do all up-to-date Americans 
write like this ? " I asked myself. 

Such a dazzle of a style ; such a pepper of names ; 
such a hulloa-old-chap familiarity with Eminent 
Hands in the Seven Arts, mostly foreign ; such 
staccato sentences, such high spirits, such a gusto 
for life. It was unlike any other book I had ever 
read, and although I should not like all literature 
to be written in the Huneker manner, I was delighted 
to make acquaintance with Promenades of an Impres- 
sionist. It braced me, made me hustle, and I 
wondered what Dr. Johnson would have thought of 
Huneker's American style. 

" No," said a compatriot of Huneker's, " all 
Americans do not write like Jim. He's just Jim 
Huneker, who collects artistic reputations, pins them 
down like so many butterflies, and he's so enthu- 
siastic about everything that the pins don't seem 
to hurt. He's antibunk, is Jim." 

Pursuing my investigations into the Huneker 
concatenations I found the following in The 
Athen&nm apropos New Cosmopolis : " Given a 
different environment, another training, Mr. 
Huneker might have emerged as an American 
Walter Pater." 

159 



160 More Authors and I 

Has a great journal ever said anything so silly ? 
James Huneker could never have been anything 
but James Huneker : as for training, he trained 
himself, just in the way he wanted to be trained ; 
as for environment, he made himself a citizen of 
the world. This " gourmet of belles-lettres,'' 
as a French critic called him, dedicated to a " half- 
mad worship of the Seven Arts," was as unlike Pater 
as Henry James was dissimilar to O. Henry. Walter 
Pater may be likened to a gentleman-farmer, quiet 
and thoughtful, brooding on his fields, watching his 
crops, sensitive to their nourishment and growth, 
with occasional reflective glances at sky and birds. 
Huneker is a keen-eyed traveller flashing past on 
a motor bicycle, waving a greeting to the reflective 
husbandman as he whizzes toward the next town. 

The capitals of the world were Huneker's real 
homes — the Opera House, the Concert Rooms, 
the Theatres, Studios and Salons. 

Pater is — repose. Huneker is — rush. He was a 
true American. His curiosity was insatiable. From 
Walt Whitman to Mary Garden, what an array 
of distinguished people he knew, remembered and 
wrote about. His style glitters, jumps, turns back, 
doubles in its tracks. He likes the short sentence. 
Thus — 

" We must believe in the reality of our Unicorn. 
He is Pan. He is Puck. He is Shelley. He is 
Ariel. He is Whim. He is Irony." 

James Gibbons Huneker was a protagonist of 
the Seven Arts : Music, Literature, Painting, 
Sculpture, Architecture, Acting, Dancing, but his 
first love and his last was Music. In Unicorns he 



James Gibbons Huneker 161 

writes, " Music-mad, I arrived in Paris during the 
last weeks of the World's Fair of 1878, impelled 
there by a parching desire to see Franz Liszt, if not 
to hear him." Note the use of the word " parching." 
That was Huneker. He would always rather be 
shrill than whisper. Imagine a shrill Walter Pater ! 

He was an inspired journalist, a literary journalist 
who, like many other brilliant writers, Chesterton 
for example, do their best work against time, when 
forced to concentrate by the approach of the pub- 
lication hour. His Life of Chopin, probably his 
best performance, and already a classic, was produced 
at leisure, as Pater composed. Huneker was bound 
to write a fine book on Chopin. He adored him, 
played him, understood him. In The Pathos of 
Distance, which contains a chapter on his first visit 
to Paris in the seventies, he writes — 

" I had mastered a page of Chopin ; I was happy ; 
I was in Paris ; I was young. And being of a prac- 
tical temperament, I read Browning every morning 
to prepare myself for the struggle with the world." 

There speaks the young American — of a past 
decade. Other times, other ways. 

Never have I been able to recapture the enthusiasm 
with which I read Promenades of an Impressionist. 
The Huneker method becomes a little tiring. His 
attack is always frontal, never round through the 
sympathies. The way to read him is the way of 
reading " O. Henry," in single instalments of a 
column or so in a daily newspaper. Once, in an 
article by Huneker I counted nineteen names, 
all of exclusive men, working in the Seven Arts. 
One had to read him carefully. 

M 



1 62 More Authors and I 

Such articles were too good to be lost. Hence 
the procession of Huneker books, consisting of short 
essays on Men, Women, Cities, Ideas and Fancies 
linked under fanciful titles. In his titles, as in his 
style, he never rests. Here are a few of them — 

Overtures — A Book of Temperaments, essays 
mainly on music, with this quotation from Whitman 
on the title-page : " Do I contradict myself ? Very 
well, then, I contradict myself " ; Mezzotints, more 
about music with a long essay on " The Music of 
the Future " ; Unicorns, with essays on Cezanne, 
James Joyce, Creative Involution and Re-reading 
Mallock ; Egoists, a Book of Supermen, with a quota- 
tion from Goethe on the title-page ; Iconoclasts, 
a Book of Dramatists from Ibsen to Shaw, with the 
motto " My truth is the truth " ; Ivory, Apes, and 
Peacocks, the title from 2 Chronicles ix. 21, all about 
authors and painters ; New Cosmopolis, a Book of 
Images, interpreting cities, with an Italian quotation 
on the title-page ; Bedouins, mainly about Mary 
Garden, but also about George Luks, and Calico 
Cats, and Caruso on Wheels ; and with a section 
called iC Idols and Ambergris " ; and so on. There 
was no end to Huneker's fecundity and faithfulness 
to aesthetic excitement. 

Of all his books I prefer the volume of short 
stories called Visionaries. He had no skill in char- 
acterization, but he had ideas, quick, odd and 
fourth dimensional. Sometimes this player with 
words descends to a quiet passage : it is very welcome. 
Pater might almost have written the following. 
It occurs in the essay on " The Artist and His 
Wife." 



James Gibbons Huneker 163 

" The true artist temperament, in reality, i- 
the perception and appreciation of beauty whether 
in pigment, form, tone, words, or in nature. It 
may exist coevally with a strong religious sense/' 

Huneker published his autobiography in two 
volumes. Characteristically he called it Steeplejack 
with this explanation : " I, who write these words, 
am no poet, but I have been a steeplejack. I have 
climbed to the very top of many steeples the world 
over, and dreamed like the rest of my fellow-beings 
the dreams that . . ." 

It is a jolly book, ill-shaped, but lively and 
curiously confidential. It should have been longer, 
or it should have been shorter, which you will. In 
it I find hints that, like other literary men who 
have lived by journalism, he had, now and then, 
a passing regret that he did not devote himself 
entirely to creative work, to writing grave things, 
like Pater, in the leisure of ample mornings. Who 
knows ? Probably we all do what we were meant 
to do, and what we can best do. But — (this from 
Steeplejack) — 

" I love painting and sculpture. I ma)- only 
look, but never own either pictures or marbles. 
I would fain be a pianist, a composer of music. I 
am neither. Nor a poet. Nor a novelist, actor, 
playwright. I have written of many things, from 
architecture to zoology, without grasping their 
inner substance. I am Jack of the Seven Arts, 
master of none. A steeplejack of the arts." 

James Gibbons Huneker ran true to form. Music 
was his first love and his last, and his idol from first 
to last was Chopin ; perhaps he never expressed 



164 More Authors and I 

himself so completely as in the concluding lines of 
Steeplejack. 

" What shall I do ? Music, always music. There 
are certain compositions by my beloved Chopin to 
master which eternity itself would not be too long. 
. . . Courage ! Time is fugacious. How many 
years have I not played that magic music ? Music 
the flying vision . . . music that merges with the 
tender air . . . its image melts on shy, misty 
shadows . . . the cloud, the cloud, the singing, 
shining cloud . . . over the skies and far away . . . 
the beckoning clouds. ..." 

There Huneker speaks, he himself. 



XXVIII. VICENTE BLASCO IBANEZ 

WHEN I was in New York the papers announced 
in bold type that Vicente Blasco Ibanez was 
" preparing to write a novel about America." 
This ardent Spanish writer and publicist does not 
know English, but " the greatest of living novelists " 
{vide the advertisements of his clever publishers) 
rises above such a slight limitation. A few months 
of rapid observation and travel, a few months of 
rushing writing, and the book will be done. We 
shall all be reading it. His publishers will see to 
that. They have exploited Ibanez magnificently. 
By the cleverest advertising campaign that has come 
under my notice, outspoken and intelligent as well 
as clever, they forced America to take Ibanez to its 
fireside. For weeks I resisted the blandishments 
of their advertisements, as I resisted the advertise- 
ments of a suit of B. V. D. underwear and an electric 
toaster ; but in the end I was conquered. Adver- 
tisement always conquers, provided that the article 
advertised is worthy. Meekly I bought The Four 
Horsemen of the Apocalypse and read it : meekly I 
bought The Shadow of the Cathedral and read it, 
and it only needed a few more thousand dollars of 
expert advertising to make me buy Mare Nostrum, 
Blood and Sand, and La Bodega. 

Do I think Ibanez the greatest of living novelists ? 
Well, no ! There is a shy, sad man living in Dorset- 

165 



1 66 More Authors and I 

shire, England, called Thomas Hardy ; there are 
others, a dozen and more : there is the author of 
Kirn, and Captains Courageous; there is Conrad. 
A man does not become a tremendous novelist 
because he handles tremendous themes. The soul, 
as Maeterlinck observes, does not always flower on 
nights of storm. 

Does Ibafiez (see advertisements) " scatter the 
riches of his imagination with a prodigality like 
that of Balzac or Dumas " ? Does he " paint great 
subjects on big canvases, with the sweep of a master " ? 
I will disregard Balzac and Dumas. Ibafiez cer- 
tainly paints great subjects on big canvases. But 
has he the " sweep of a master " ? Well, no. 

In my opinion The Shadow of the Cathedral is a 
much finer book than The Four Horsemen. It 
shapes better, and the theme, a devastating indict- 
ment, is logically and comprehensively worked out. 
But The Shadow of the Cathedral would never have 
had its present success had it not been for the " big 
boom " (do you remember Stephen Leacock's 
delightful irony about the word " big " in criticism ?) 
in The Four Horsemen. Why was that work so 
successful ? Fifty per cent, of its success, perhaps 
more, was due to clever advertising ; but The Four 
Horsemen also galloped up Fifth Avenue at the 
psychological moment. The war was at its height, 
the newspapers were crowded with bewildering 
details, the tongues of gossips ran ceaselessly, every- 
body was feverish for news, many little, jumpy 
men wrote long, jumpy articles, and into this 
hubbub of sketches rolled the big (I must use the 
word) crude canvas of The Four Horsemen of the 



Vicente Blasco Ibdiiez 167 

Apocalypse. Obviously the author is a vital man, 
a man of parts and energy, who had seen the war, 
who had felt its horror and sorrow, who has a big 
(forgive me) surging imagination, so riotous that 
while he is composing he is quite unable to pause 
anywhere for art's sake. " I write explosively," 
says Ibanez. " I am sometimes hardly aware what 
I am doing. The germ of an idea comes to me ; 
it grows and grows until there is a sort of spontaneous 
combustion. " Just so. That is the reason why 
I prefer Mrs. Burnett or Edith Wharton, Barric 
or Leonard Merrick. 

Ibanez begins a novel slowly, he climbs laboriously, 
he reaches the crest, then " once on the other side I 
cannot stop myself — I rush headlong, whirling, 
plunging, working endlessly until I reach the finale." 
He wrote The Four Horsemen in four months in 
Paris, in 191 6. Toward the end " I worked thirty 
hours at a stretch." This is magnificent, but it is 
not art. Of course I am well aware that the readers 
who make up the 100,000 circulation groups do not 
want art : they want a story. But we must keep 
the flag of art flying. Perhaps I should not have 
penned this gentle protest had not his publishers 
called him " the greatest of living novelists," and 
had they not announced in big (ah, again) type 
that he is " the dominant figure in the world of 
modern fiction." 

But I do not want to belittle Ibanez. He is a 
force ; he has gusto and vitality, and he is fiercely 
interested in many things besides the writing of 
fiction — politics, history, sociology. His tirade on 
Ponce de Leon was fine, his defence of Spain was 



1 68 More Authors and I 

passionately eloquent. He is quick. When a 
heckler asked him, " Why did Spain come to Mexico 
to disturb the Indians ? " he answered, " Why were 
the Indians of Manhattan disturbed ? " He can 
make a gesture, too, as when he led the subscriptions 
for a memorial in the Bronx to Edgar Allan Poe. 

As Vicente Blasco Ibafiez signed a $30,000 lecture 
contract in America a great many people had an 
opportunity of hearing him. I had that pleasure. 
The proceedings were divided into two parts. 
First, a gentleman who knows both Spanish and 
English read a translation of what Sefior Ibafiez 
was about to say. That was not very exciting, 
and when the folk in the gallery shouted to him 
to speak up, he was apparently unable to oblige. 
Having repeated their cries of " Louder," and 
" Speak up," with no effect, they stampeded down 
to the balcony. That was exciting. There were 
vacant chairs in the box which I occupied. Upon 
them I had deposited my hat, cane, coat and a 
Spanish-English dictionary. Suddenly the box was 
invaded by a bevy of high-school girls from the 
upper regions. They were about to take a real 
Spanish lesson. From them I learnt more than 
from the dictionary. Indeed, the entire audience 
was very interesting. Latins permit themselves 
to betray emotion, and it was a pleasure to watch 
their expressive faces as Ibafiez declaimed, protested, 
cajoled, persuaded and suggested. 

He is an orator, a natural orator, I should say. 
His gestures seem impulsive, they follow his thought, 
the whole man moves as he talks, and at the right 
moment he glides from one side of the reading desk 



Vicente Blasco Ibdhez 169 

to the other. There is a manuscript on the desk ; 
he never refers to it ; but the desk is useful to tap 
upon with his long fingers when he wishes to 
emphasize points. Frequent applause follows his 
periods, which he utilizes to pat his brow with a 
beautiful white handkerchief. When the applause 
was loudest the bevy of girls informed me he had 
been saying that the only thing that can drive away 
Social Unrest, the " Fifth Horseman of the Apoca- 
lypse," is Social Justice. " Why cannot we unite 
on justice ? " he cried. " How strange it is that 
human beings who can stand shoulder to shoulder 
in war should drift apart when the imminent menace 
is conquered, and by their differences invite 
catastrophe." 

A vital, vigorous, fearless man. A sturdy man 
with a bull-like head ; an " agin the Government " 
man : in 1885 he was imprisoned for six months 
for writing a sonnet against the Spanish Government ; 
a man of imagination and dynamic driving power. 
My only objection to him is that he allows himself 
to be called " the greatest of living novelists." But 
perhaps, as he doesn't read English, he is not aware 
that this has been said about him. So here's to you, 
Vicente Blasco Ibariez. 



XXIX. W. W. JACOBS 

IN the late nineties sometimes I met at literary 
gatherings, which usually took the form of 
crowded " At Homes " and dinners, a slight, 
slim, unobtrusive young man, fair and clean-shaven, 
with observant eyes, whose way it was to hover 
shyly on the outskirts of the crowd. He did not 
make much impression upon me : he never said 
anything particularly witty or tender : we just 
nodded, but I always seemed to know that this 
hovering, unobtrusive man was present. He wrote, 
I was told, funny little stories about sailormen ; but 
in those days I was not interested in funny little 
stories about sailormen. 

I met him also at the houses of H. G. Wells and 
other friends, and in the company of fellow-humorists 
(those were the days of the New Humour) such as 
Jerome K. Jerome, Barry Pain and W. Pett Ridge. 
He never had much to say, but one was always 
glad to see him. There was a companionable air 
about his unchanging habit of observation, and his 
silent and rather ironical attitude, which suggested 
that he paid visits, and attended social gatherings 
as a way of filling time, rather than as an opportunity 
for studying character. 

Obviously the men and women that he met on 
these occasions were of little use to him in his stories. 
Not one of us understood the difference between 

170 



W. W. Jacobs 171 

a barque and a schooner : we knew something about 
Guy de Maupassant and Flaubert, but nothing 
about marline-spikes or capstans. Where W. W. 
Jacobs got his intricate nautical knowledge from I 
know not. He never paraded it : he never said 
" Avast there " or " Shiver my timbers," and he 
never, in my hearing, made any reference to that 
exhaustless and amusing person — the Night Watch- 
man — who figures in so many of his stories. He was 
merely W. W. Jacobs, a silent little man with the 
humorist's tell-tale mouth, who had a snug berth 
as clerk in the Savings Bank Department of the 
Civil Service, and who added to his income by writing 
stories in the evenings. 

Gradually it became borne in upon me that his 
stones were important. People talked about them, 
never critically, never with any idea of " placing " 
him, never comparing this short story writer with 
the writers of other short stories. Everybody's 
attitude to a tale by W. W. Jacobs was just enjoy- 
ment. He brightened an hour : he made the 
laughter ripple, and he pleased everybody. He 
captured the Great Public which merely wants 
to be amused, and interested the Little Public of 
critics and faddists who dread being amused lest 
their judgment of the correct canons of literary 
art should be over-ridden by mere delight in a human 
nature humorous story. Few books are welcomed 
with such gusts of praise as Many Cargoes, his first 
volume, which was issued in 1896. Who could 
resist a story beginning — 

" A small but strong lamp was burning in the 
foVsle of the schooner w Greyhound,' by the light of 



172 More Authors and I 

which a middle-aged seaman of sedate appearance 
sat crocheting an antimacassar." There are twenty- 
one stories in Many Cargoes, all variations on one 
string, each neat, direct, humorous ; and one is as 
good as another. 

Many people were familiar with these stories, 
for many of them had appeared in To-day and 
The Idler under Jerome K. Jerome's editorship ; 
and later the word went round that the astute 
George Newnes was paying W. W. Jacobs enormous 
sums for the stories he wrote each month for The 
Strand Magazine, A good Jacobs sailorman story 
always was, and I suppose still is, a draw. Everyone 
likes to laugh, and it is impossible not to laugh when 
Jacobs means us to laugh. He never bores the reader. 
He makes pictures but he ignores scenery. I do 
not say that all sailormen talk as amusingly in life 
as the Jacobs sailormen of fiction ; but the reader 
feels that it is all quite natural and inevitable. 
Every page has its laugh or its smile. His sentiment 
is austere, and he has no sense of tears. 

The Jacobs recipe is simple. First there is 
characterization, whether it be a seaman, a seaman's 
wife, or a pretty girl whose destiny it is to become 
a seaman's wife. The dialogue is the essence of 
his stories, and he never goes wrong with it. He 
embroils these characters in complications ; he 
sets them at cross purposes, and all comes happily 
right, or humorously wrong, in the end. The setting 
of these tales is familiarly unfamiliar even to Lon- 
doners — the sea hamlets that spout out along the 
mouth of the Thames, the inland waterways fed 
by barges, and the southern and eastern coast towns, 



W. W. Jacobs 173 

visited by hardy sailing vessels. Sometimes his 
sailormen set forth on long voyages ; but our 
author rarely follows them. The captains and mates 
disappear, and their lives are not resumed until 
they return to Fairhaven, or Wapping Old Stairs, 
or Salthaven, or Limehouse or Dialstone Lane. 

All this would be as nothing were it not for one 
thing — the Jacobs humour. That is the cement 
that unites him to all sorts and conditions of people. 
It never fails him : it is as bubbling in his long 
stories as in his short ones, and the only reason that 
I prefer the short stories to the long ones, is that in 
the short stories the humour is directer and quicker. 
But even in the long stories there is no padding. 
No author ever did without padding so neatly. 

One complaint only I have against him. Some- 
times when I have settled myself to enjoy a Jacobs 
story, I find that I have slipped into reading one of 
his gruesome tales such as " The Monkey's Paw " 
or " The Well." They are excellently done because 
he is a born story-teller, but a Jacobs story without 
humour is like an egg without salt, or motoring 
on a dark night. He is an author with one speciality : 
he has the courage or the wisdom to keep to it 
(almost always), and I do not suppose that the reading 
world will ever tire of the Jacobs brand of humorous 
sailormen stories. He and Conrad both deal with 
the sea — so differently. Sometimes I wonder what 
Conrad thinks of Jacobs, and what Jacobs thinks of 
Conrad. 

Two encounters with him I remember. They 
were pointed meetings. After he had become 
successful he asked me if I approved of his intention 



174 More Authors and I 

to resign from the Civil Service and devote himself 
entirely to story writing. 

" No, no, no," was my emphatic answer. 

He did not take my advice. He resigned from 
the Civil Service. 

Some years later he turned to me at some kind 
of a literary gathering, I forget what, looking pros- 
perous with a new tie, and a well-cut coat, and he 
said, " You were wrong." 

Jacobs' books in the public libraries are well 
thumbed. The mention of his name brings a 
smile and a chirrup ; everybody has a feeling of 
gratitude for the entertainment he has given ; but 
it is difficult to remember individual stories or 
episodes. 

I asked an American woman what she thought 
of W. W. Jacobs. 

After a brief reflection, she said : " Oh yes, I 
know — the humorous Englishman ! He's one of 
the few funny writers I like." 

"Do you specifically recall any of his books ? '" 
I asked. 

" No, I don't think so. Oh, yes ; I do remember 
something about a cargo." 

So I began to read to her the first tale in Many 
Cargoes — 

" Yes, I've sailed under some 'cute skippers 
in my time," said the N^ight Watchman, " but the 
one I'm going to tell you about ought never to 
have been trusted out without 'is ma. A good 
many o' my skippers had fads, but this one . . ." 



XXX. LIONEL JOHNSON 

POETS seem to eonsider the term " Minor 
Poet " a reproach. I said once to a versifier, 
" Who thinks less of a man for being a Minor 
Prophet, so why should a maker of verses object 
to being called a Minor Poet ? ' : There is really no 
other term. 

Lionel Johnson was a minor poet. He was also 
an extremely fastidious and scholarly writer of 
prose. He was a critic, a very fine critic. He lived 
by criticism, but it was poetry that he loved. 

I knew him for many years. I will not say I knew 
him well, for I do not think that anyone knew this 
slight, refined, cloistral man well. After a success- 
ful career at Winchester School, and New College, 
Oxford, he took chambers in Clifford's Inn, at the 
corner of Fleet Street and Chancery Lane, but 
hidden from passers-by. There he lived alone with 
his books, often " sporting his oak," that is, locking 
the door against visitors. Once the porter said 
to a caller, " He've been in there two days without 
seeing nobody. I don't like it." W'hen Johnson 
was in his monastic retirement it was impossible 
to draw him out, or induce him to answer letters 
or telegrams. Many a time, when I was editing 
The Academy, have I sent messengers to Clifford's 
Inn to beg Lionel Johnson to deliver the article 
that he had promised by a certain date. No reply. 



176 More Authors and I 

A week later, perhaps, he would enter the office with 
the review. He never troubled to find an excuse 
for his remissness : he would steal gently into the 
room, hand the copy to me, smiling his strange, 
interior smile, so gentle and quizzical, yet so radiant, 
so knowing, yet so wistful ; then he would relapse 
into silence, and roam round the room, picking books 
from the shelves, and smiling at passages. I would 
watch him furtively, for his ascetic, sensitive, boyish 
face carried a world of meaning. When William 
Butler Yeats said that Lionel Johnson's silences 
had beak and claw, he said precisely the right 
thing. 

But he was far from being an uncommunicative 
man. He had many friends, at least he liked to say 
that he had many friends, and he loved to dedicate 
individual poems to these friends. Although toler- 
ably silent in company, he was always within the aura 
of the conversation. He was sympathetic, there 
was not a touch of arrogance in his composition, 
but I always felt that wherever he was, or whatever 
he was doing, he was living an interior life. He had 
insight as well as sight, in Plato's phrase. Once 
he asked the editorial staff of The Academy to spend 
an evening with him at Clifford's Inn. It was the 
neatest and the most scholarly chamber that I 
have ever seen. He was a charming host, so modest 
and quiet that he seemed to be like a guest in his 
own house. We did the talking. His method 
of entertaining us consisted in moving silently from 
bookshelf to bookshelf, picking a volume that had 
some particular interest, an autograph letter or 
marginal notes by the author, and showing it to us 



Lionel Johnson 177 

with a proud smile and the air of a man who is dis- 
playing a Limoges enamel or a priceless miniature. 

When he came down from Oxford he began to 
write for The Academy and continued under various 
editors. He was a contributor to cultivate and 
nurse, for his reviews were exceptional. They were 
essays, scholarly, reticently rhetorical, and expressed 
in beautiful prose. I felt that an issue of The 
Academy without a review by Lionel Johnson left 
a blame in the paper. So gently magnificent were 
some of his phrases that we would declaim them 
aloud, when reading the proofs, for the mere pleasure 
of hearing the harmonies of his sonorous and sensi- 
tive periods. I remember one of the passages to 
this day, " Some dim half-murmured thought of 
Pascal, some deep and plangent utterance of 
Lucretius." 

So I was somewhat disappointed on reading 
Reviews and Critical Papers, by Lionel Johnson, 
collected by Robert Shafer from back numbers of 
The Academy, to find that he has only included the 
articles that were signed by Lionel Johnson, and 
has omitted altogether the anonymous papers from 
his pen. They were, in my opinion, far finer than 
the signed articles, because I allowed him to choose 
his own subjects. I never gave him a book for 
review without first intruding into his silence, 
and finding out if he would like to write on that 
particular author. 

These signed articles contain reviews of The Light 
that Failed, Life's Handicap, and Barrack Room 
Ballads, by Kipling ; The Wrecker, by R. L. Steven- 
son and Osbourne ; Ballads and Songs, by John 

N 



178 More Authors and I 

Davidson ; One of our Conquerors, by George 
Meredith, and The Religion of a Literary Man, by 
Richard Le Gallienne. The last named might be 
taken as an example, in a School of Journalism, of 
the way a review should be written. The subject 
matter of the book must have been intensely anti- 
pathetic to Lionel Johnson, but he shows no sign 
of animosity. He is perfectly fair and just, makes 
no attempt to prove that Le Gallienne is wrong, 
but devotes all his learning and sympathy to explain- 
ing the author's purpose and meaning, although all 
through the review the wary reader can feel Lionel 
Johnson's sad, silent smile of disapproval. 

His poems have been collected, and are now in 
their final form. To many their religious bias is 
too strong for congenial reading, but there are some 
that haunt the reader, and express the innermost 
sanctuary of this lonely, unhappy-happy, chivalrous 
man. 

Is he becoming popular ? I find, in John O'Lon- 
dorfs Weekly, half a page of " Nibbles from Lionel 
Johnson." That title would have amused him. 
Here is one of the " Nibbles " showing his great 
tolerance : " No one is intolerably and divinely 
right, no one pathetically and stubbornly wrong." 

Here is another : " Of modern writers, only Mr. 
Pater shares with Mr. Stevenson this fine anxiety not 
to play life false by using inaccurate expressions." 

He owed much to Walter Pater. Always he 
was his devoted disciple. One of his last contribu- 
tions to The Academy was a threnody on Walter 
Pater, brimming with love and fealty. Another 
beautiful poem is " By the Statue of King Charles," 



Lionel Jolwso?i 179 

a subject near to his heart. It has been published 
as a broadside, with a cut from a contemporary print. 
How much of Lionel Johnson will live ? Cer- 
tainly his Art of Thomas Hardy, perhaps the pro- 
foundest and most sympathetic study of a contem- 
porary novelist of genius ever written. Also a few 
of his poems. He was not a creative writer. He 
was a fastidious and chivalrous commentator and 
interpreter, always seeing the finest in what he 
judged. He called himself " Poet and Critic." 
That expresses him. 



XXXI. STEPHEN LEACOCK 

EVERYTHING was arranged for my article 
on Stephen Leacock, " University Professor 
and Humorist." All was neatly prepared, 
and I was " on time." I had planned to begin the 
article at ten in the morning. The clock struck ten 
as I took up my pen, and surveyed the little pile of 
newspaper cuttings about Leacock — essays, inter- 
views, comments — most of them dealing with his 
visit to London as lecturer. And there were my 
own notes : (i) Why is he so popular ? (2) Why 
did the London press give him such an ovation ? 
(3) Recall what you have read of his books. (4) Do 
you laugh much at his writings ? (5) Describe his 
speech at the Lotus Club, New York. (6) Describe 
his first lecture in London with the editor of Punch 
in the chair. (Question, was the laughter of the 
editor of Punch genuine ?) (7) Briefly sketch his 
life. (8) Is there on record another case of a Political 
Economist who was humorous ? (9) Have you 
ever known anybody who laughed aloud at his 
" Boarding-house Geometry " ? (10) Sum him up. 
Try to be funny yourself. 

You perceive that everything was in train. I 
had even written the first line of my article, 
" Stephen Leacock has told the world that he would 
sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the 
whole Encyclopedia Britannic a" I was about to 

180 



Stephen Leacock 181 

begin the second line, when I started and threw 
down my pen. " Oh, and ah," I cried, " I've 
forgotten all about that parcel of books. . . ." It 
was then three minutes past ten. 

I hurried to the Unopened Parcels department 
of my study and dragged out a fat package. It was 
labelled " Books by Stephen Leacock " ; it came 
into my possession thus. Some weeks ago I remarked 
to a member of the John Lane firm (they publish 
Leacock's books) that I was about to write upon him, 
and said that I would like to look at the illustrated 
edition of Nonsense Novels. " By all means," replied 
the John Lane partner, " I'll have a parcel of his 
books made up for you " (publishers are extraordi- 
narily kind). ... I had forgotten all about the parcel. 
Eagerly I cut the string and arranged the books, 
there were twelve of them, into two symmetrical 
piles. All except two, which are serious, have 
gay pictures in colour on the jackets by A. H. Fish. 
Here are the two piles. 

Mostly Funny : — 

Literary Lapses, Nonsense Novels, Sunshine Sketches, 
Behind the Beyond, Arcadian Adventures, Moonbeams 
from the Larger Lunacy, Further Foolishness, Frenzied 
Fiction, Winsome Winnie, The Hohenzollerns in 
America. 

Fairly Serious : — 

Essays and Literary Studies, The Unsolved Riddle 
of Social Justice. 

It was then seventeen minutes past ten. 

I am careful to note the time, because, as you 



1 82 More Authors and I 

may have perhaps guessed, I spent the rest of the 
day before the fire reading, skimming and remember- 
ing those twelve Leacock books. I read them at 
intervals until ten o'clock that night. Please do 
not pity me. I enjoyed those hours, and although 
I am aware that this gulping of fun is not the way 
to treat a humorist, he stood the test remarkably 
well. I did not enjoy every page, for a professional 
humorist cannot help being professional, and Mr. 
Leacock is rugged, and boisterous, and determined 
to get every ounce of fun out of literature and life ; 
but he certainly has the humorous mentality and 
point of view. Some of the books I had met before, 
as American hostesses have a pleasant way of leaving 
a Leacock volume or two in the guest bedroom, 
hoping thus to insure a cheerful appearance of the 
guest at breakfast. It was my duty to read these 
books, and it was also a pleasure. I repeat that 
thus to gulp a humorist is not the right way to treat 
him. As I read I tucked pieces of paper between 
the pages of sections that had moved me to laughter 
or to admiration of their skill in the production 
of humour. For Mr. Leacock's humour does not 
ripple up like Charles Lamb's or Andrew Lang's 
or W. W. Jacobs' : it jumps at you ; it hits you ; 
it seems to be saying, " If you don't think this 
funny — well, don't." I find that I have put pieces 
of paper between the pages of My Financial Career, 
The Man in Asbestos, Passionate Paragraphs, Humour 
As 1 See It, Winsome Winnie. But I have not put 
pieces of paper in either of the two serious books, 
not because they are not good, but because when I 
am on the track of humour I like to keep on the track. 



Stephen Leacock 183 

The two still more serious books with which he 
began his literary career I have not read, and prob- 
ably never shall. They are called, Elements of 
Political Science, and Baldwin and La Fontaine, 
in the " Makers of Canada Series." 

As preface to Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, 
I find six pages of autobiography, dated 191 2, McGill 
University, which suits my purpose admirably. 
He was born at Swanmoor, Hants, England. In 
1876 his parents migrated to Canada, his father 
settling on a farm near Lake Simcoe, in Ontario. 
Stephen was graduated from the University of 
Toronto in 1891 ; he taught school, and in 1899 
went to the University of Chicago to study economics 
and political science. In 1903 he took the degree 
of Doctor of Philosophy, and now the humorist 
begins to function. Hear him : " The meaning 
of this degree is that the recipient of instruction 
is examined for the last time in his life, and is pro- 
nounced completely full. After this no new ideas 
can be imparted to him." Since that auspicious 
day he has belonged to the staff of McGill University, 
first as lecturer in Political Science, and later as head 
of the department of Economics and Political 
Science. In this position honoured, but quite 
unknown to the outside world, he would have 
remained, had he not published (daring man) 
Literary Lapses in 1910, and Nonsense Novels in 191 1 . 

I met him first at a literary luncheon party in 
1 91 2. After the repast I said to my host, who was 
his publisher, " What is the name of the granite- 
faced, silent man with an interior smile, who sat 
on your right ? " " That," whispered my host, 



184 More Authors and I 

as if he was telling me an unwilling secret, " was 
Professor Stephen Leacock, the great Canadian 
humorist." " Really ! " I said. 

The next time we met was at a dinner given by 
the Lotus Club of New York. Leacock was no 
longer shy. Success had unharnessed that interior 
smile, and caused it to bubble continually over his 
granite face. Success has given him immense 
confidence. He plays with his audience, or rather 
we willingly, delightedly play with him. I have 
never met a humorist who so rejoices in his own 
humour, and distributes all his whimsical thoughts 
so bounteously all around. And I have never met 
so ready a humorist. Here is an example : The 
guest of honour at that Lotus Club dinner was Sir 
Philip Gibbs, but some unexpected and important 
engagement had detained him : he had informed 
the chairman that he hoped to be with us about 
a quarter before ten. By half-past nine the pro- 
gramme of speeches had come to an end and Stephen 
Leacock — this I learned later — was requisitioned 
to fill up the time till Sir Philip Gibbs should arrive. 
His speech, which was extempore, was delightful : 
he kept us rocking with laughter, partly because he 
was so much amused himself ; and at intervals he 
broke off, listening like an Indian, or a trapper, 
for the footfall of Philip Gibbs. He did not arrive, 
but Leacock went on with his fooling and Further 
Foolishness till past ten o'clock, and I am sure that 
he could have continued till midnight. It was a 
tour deforce in impromptu humour. 

So was his first lecture in London on Frenzied 
Fiction. The chairman, the editor of Punch, in 



Stephen Leacock 185 

his introductory remarks, had said something funny 
about those who preside over meetings, and when 
Stephen Leacock rose his face was one expansive 
smile, *so redundant about the regions of the mouth 
that he tried to hide it with his burly hand. 
Boisterously he ignored the subject of his lecture, 
and told us of chairmen he had known, and we 
laughed, and laughed, and laughed, partly because 
he himself was so immensely amused. And when, 
after half an hour, he came to Fretizied Fiction, I 
found that I knew the extracts, but my laughter 
in reading them was mild and tame compared with 
my sustained absurd laughter when he recited them. 

That is my report of Stephen Leacock. As a 
lecturer, either by art or by natural simplicity, 
he conveys his enjoyment of humour to his audiences 
so vividly, so unconstrainedly that, even against 
their will, they laugh from his first word to his last. 

Constant practice has made him see life in terms 
of satirical humour. Yet he can be serious, witness 
his beautiful tribute to Col. John McCrae in The 
Times of London ; but I am sure that he meant 
it when he said that he would rather have written 
Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia 
Br [tannic a. 

So would I. 



XXXIL SINCLAIR LEWIS 

IN common with many other people I read 
Main Street when I was in America. It was 
hardly possible to avoid buying Main Street 
and reading it. This hard, brilliant, reporter-like, 
intensely observant chronicle of " the town, in our 
tale, called Gopher Prairie, Minnesota," was vocifer- 
ously advertised, and widely reviewed. The 
Columnists played with it again and again. I saw 
people reading it in trains ; and at Christmas time 
in country houses, I learned to be surprised when 
it was not lying on a table. A lady remarked to 
me, " Every American should read Main Street 
as a penance. Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, is the 
twentieth-century substitute for Concord, Massa- 
chusetts ! Alas ! " 

It was no penance to me to read Main Street. 
I enjoyed it all, even the slang ; for my interest 
is acute in the American Small Western Town, 
fighting its way to success, and taking its culture 
in hasty gulps. " You can't expect a nation," 
writes Mr. Sinclair Lewis elsewhere, " that's fighting 
the wilderness to stop and hitch up its galluses and 
fuss over a lot of poetry." At the time I did not 
know what a gallus was. No matter. Many of 
the words and abbreviations in Small Town ver- 
nacular are unfamiliar to me. 

I was interested in the story. I was also interested 
186 



Sinclair Lewis 187 

in Mr. Lewis' method and manner, and quick 
staccato style. He writes as if Europe and New 
England had never existed, as if George Meredith 
and George Eliot, VV. D. Howells and Mary Wilkins 
had never been. He is one of the new westerners 
who are collaring American literature as a full-back 
collars the ball in a football game. I do not lament 
this rush of stalwarts from the literary west. These 
things have to be. The home of my ideals is New 
England, but it would be foolish to close the eyes 
to the power and vitality that the western writers 
are showing. The tale of their successes is growing. 
Such writers as Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, 
and Upton Sinclair seem already an old story : 
it is the newer talents that are flinging the analysis, 
contrariness, and growth of the Small Town at us 
— Sinclair Lewis, Zona Gale, Sherwood Anderson, 
Floyd Dell, Waldo Frank, and that admirable writer, 
Willa Cather. It will be observed that they use 
the novel as a medium in which to record their 
crowding impressions of the life they know, rarely 
offering a solution, or conveying a moral. They 
are too intensely occupied in observing and recording 
to pause and consider what may be the meaning 
of it all, or to discover the way of happiness — as yet. 
One critic, Mr. Jay E. House, rather pleased me 
when he wrote, " The trouble with Mr. Sinclair 
Lewis is his youth. In ten or fifteen years he will 
be able to see both sides of Main Street." 

Sociologists, economists, and social welfare people 
generally will have to study these western novels. 
There is insight in them and observation of facts, 
things one does not often find in textbooks or the 



1 88 More Authors and I 

heavier kind of magazine sociological articles. After 
reading Main Street I feel that I know something 
about life in a Western Small Town. I may not 
want to live there ; but it is interesting and profit- 
able to reflect on the eddies and currents, the shoals 
and prospective deep waters of Main Street, Gopher 
Prairie, Minnesota, and elsewhere. 

For an American writer all roads lead to New 
York, and many writers, not all, take to the road. 
So in England all roads lead to London, and New 
Yorkers and Londoners merely smile when wild 
youths cry out that Chicago and Manchester are 
the real literary centres. 

Mr. Lewis became a New Yorker. The exactions 
of being a " best seller " are many, and include 
writing enthusiastic bits of praise about other authors 
which are duly and frankly used in advertisements. 
When Mr. Lewis has time for reflection he can look 
back upon a strenuous New York career as editor, 
journalist, writer of short stories and press agent, 
and beyond all this, close to his heart, I think, 
nesting there, is the dominant fact that he was born 
in a Small Town in 1885 — the town being Sauk 
Centre, Minnesota. 

He is the author of at least seven books, some 
stories in The Saturday Evening Post, and elsewhere. 
One of these books, Hike and the Aeroplane, was 
issued in 191 2 under his nom de guerre of Tom 
Graham. Three of his books, besides Main Street, 
I have read : Our Mr. Wrenn, published in 191 4, his 
first; Innocents: A Story for Lovers, 1917, and 
Free Air, 191 9. The last named is the best. I 
delight in this gay, bustling account of a motor 



Sinclair Lewis 189 

ride from Minneapolis to Seattle, and the impact 
of western " manners " on eastern " culture." 
Our Mr. JVrenn is a study of a Dickens character, 
with a dash of VV. J. Locke, a jolly, high-spirited 
book, but rather young. The Innocents is delightful, 
the story of a Darby and Joan who meet their fate 
with a smile, and with pluck. 

None of these books could have made Sinclair 
Lewis a " best seller." They are preparations. 
He is feeling his way, exploring himself. As I 
consider them I see a cistern, the Sinclair Lewis 
cistern with six little taps representing six of his 
books. He turns on one after the other, producing 
Our Mr. Wrenn, Hike and the Aeroplane, Trail of 
the Hawk, Innocents, The Job, Free Air. The water 
flows out in little, modest streams ; but the cistern, 
being connected with a constant supply, is still 
full. Suddenly he turns on all the six taps at once. 
Result — Main Street. 

Will Mr. Sinclair Lewis be displeased if I call 
him a thinker ? By this I mean that besides his 
imaginative insight which, of course, is his chief 
asset, he is also a collector of facts which he collates, 
ponders over and resolves into a philosophy — actual, 
sprightly and often impressive. This was exemplified 
in an article by him in The New York Evening Post 
called " The Pioneer Myth." It is scathing. There 
would have been a terrible outcry had it been 
written by an Englishman. Here is a passage : " Sam 
(Sam Clark of Gopher Prairie) illustrates all the 
Americans who justify — who for a hundred years have 
justified — by the pioneer myth their unwillingness to 
ponder anything but bookkeeping and amours." 



190 More Authors and I 

Here is another passage. It begins with a remark 
which is common in Gopher Prairie, " I'm so busy 
I have no time for reading." Mr. Lewis' comment 
is, " Time for the movies, auction bridge, motoring, 
golf, two-hour luncheons, and exacting perusal 
of the funnies in the evening paper they do have, 
but being pioneers, they cannot be expected to 
observe such inconsequential phenomena as Ethan 
Frome, McTeague, and The Titan, such petty events 
as Men and Steel, The Dark Mother, Poor White 
and Miss Lulu Bett" 

Yet the author of Main Street loves Main Street ; 
he believes in her inherent power and her future : 
so loving her he chastens her. 

Mr. Lewis is a great reader — chiefly of the best 
modern novels. He may read other books : it is the 
novelists, the intellectual set, that he writes about 
and talks about. Apparently he has raced through 
and assimilated all the best modern English and 
American novels. In his Dedicatory Introduction 
to The Innocents he said nice things about English 
authors, but in his lecture in New York he seemed 
determined to make his audience read and admire 
the Americans. Although rather long I must quote 
his Dedicatory Introduction to The Innocents — 

" If this were a ponderous work of realism, such 
as the author has attempted to write, and will 
doubtless essay again, it would be perilous to dedicate 
it to the splendid assembly of young British writers, 
lest the critics search for Influences and Imitations. 
But since this is a flagrant excursion, a tale for people 
who still read Dickens and clip out spring poetry 
and love old people and children, it may safely 



Sinclair Lewis 191 

confess the writer's strident admiration for Compton 
Mackenzie, Hugh Walpolc, Oliver Onions, D. H. 
Lawrence, J. D. Beresford, Gilbert Cannan, Patrick 
MacGill, and their peers, whose novels are the 
histories of our contemporaneous Golden Age. 
Nor may these be mentioned without a yet more 
enthusiastic tribute to their master and teacher 
(he probably abominates being called either a master 
or a teacher), H. G. Wells." 



Probably I should not have written about Sinclair 
Lewis had I not attended his lecture at the New 
York Town Hall on " Modern Fiction : an Inter- 
pretation of Life." Then he became a real person 
to me, a vivid man, with views and enthusiasms, 
and humour, and irony, and gusto, who would 
rather make his audience laugh than cry, rather 
startle than impress them. Yet a serious man — 
in the American way, able to utter plain truths 
in racy idiom. 

When this tall, slim, blond, youngish man 
appeared upon the platform I said to myself, 
" William J. Locke. He is the American Locke.' ' 
The parallel is open to criticism because Locke is 
languid and his utterance has a pleasant drawl ; 
Lewis is quick and his utterance may be likened 
to a Gatling-gun. In brief, Locke is an English- 
man, Lewis an American. 

His lecture has been so widely quoted and com- 
mented upon that I refrain from discussing it. 
What interested me was that a young American 
author-lecturer should be able to draw a large paying 



192 More Authors and I 

audience in New York, and insist, and insist that the 
time had come when American literature must stand 
on its own broad feet, and march straightway into 
the Promised Land. In asides, and looking back- 
ward, now and again, over his shoulder, he threw 
some scraps of appreciation at his old friends, the 
British authors. But through most of the lecture 
he was in the mood of Walt Whitman when he 
wrote — 

" Clear the way there, Jonathan ! 
I love to look on the Stars and Stripes, I hope the fifes will play 
Yankee Doodle." 

When the lecture was over, with my customary 
enthusiasm, I rushed behind to congratulate Sinclair 
Lewis. 

" You must give that lecture in London," said I. 
" It would go." 

He beamed. " I am going to London this 
summer," said he. 

Has the American literary invasion of England at 
last really begun ? 

He came to London. I met him there, and also 
in the country, in a half-timbered, Elizabethan 
house in an English village, so old, so still, so different 
from Gopher Prairie. He was quieter ; and there 
was something like a look of wonder in his eyes. 
I draw the curtain. I await his next book. 



XXXIII. AMY LOWELL 

AT an American literary-theatrical gathering 
in New York I was called upon for a speech. 
My remarks apparently pleased a dignified 
lady in the audience, who had been pointed out 
to me as a patron of the arts, and who held delightful 
evenings at her house — supper and talk. My 
speech must have pleased her because, after the 
gathering, she invited me to her next symposium. 
There I met Miss Amy Lowell for the first time : 
the memory of the encounter is still vivid. 

It was a large gathering of interesting people. 
At supper the place next to mine was vacant ; but 
the talk was so congenial that I forgot the gap until 
the meal was well advanced ; then the door opened, 
and a dominant woman entered briskly and bravely. 
She did not slink to her seat with a muttered apology, 
which is the usual custom of late guests ; no, she 
made some bright and quick explanation, seated 
herself with an air of extreme confidence, and 
volubly led the conversation into her own channels. 
To my surprise the guests acquiesced. Clearly 
she was a person of importance. I set myself to 
find out who she might be by interjecting gently 
uttered questions on literature and life into her 
eloquence. She answered me cursorily, as if I 
was rather a nuisance ; but she gave me more than 
half her attention, and a straight-from-the-shoulder 
o 193 



194 More Authors and I 

reply, when I said something pertinent, and almost 
witty, about Carl Sandburg. Then I had an inspira- 
tion. " Why," I said in my sweetest tones, " I 
believe you are Amy Lowell." For an instant 
she glared at me ; then she said, " Who did you think 
I was ? " A few minutes later I again had the 
pleasure of arousing this masterful conversationalist 
to an epigrammatic reply to the following ingenuous 
question, " Why were you not at the James Russell 
Lowell centenary celebration ? " 

Later we trooped into the next room and talked, 
Miss Amy Lowell reclining on a couch in our midst, 
something after the manner of Madame Recamier. 
She was the centre, the protagonist of the delightful 
symposium that followed till near midnight, and I 
frankly admit that she is one of the best talkers, and 
one of the best brains that I met in America. I 
said to myself as I walked home, " They tell me that 
she is a poet. Really, I must read her poems. 
Better begin with Can Grande's Castle, which people 
— no, exclusive literary circles — are talking about, 
and which I have heard Miss Amy Lowell is in the 
habit of reading aloud to admiring but rather 
bewildered audiences." 

But I did not read Can Grande's Castle just then. 
I came across her Tendencies in Modern American 
Poetry, drawn to it by the following statement 
made by Mr. Clement K. Shorter : " I have no 
hesitation in insisting that Miss Amy Lowell's 
Tendencies in Modern American Poetry is one of the 
most striking volumes of criticism that has appeared 
in recent years." This is a book that any poet 
or proseman would be proud to have written. It 



Amy Lowell 195 

is a temperate, balanced and very sympathetic 
examination of the New Movement in American 
poetry on the hypothesis that, " Poets are always 
the advance guard of literature ; the advance guard 
of life." 

Six poets are chosen for examination : Edwin 
Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Edgar Lee 
Masters, Carl Sandburg, " H. D.," and John Gould 
Fletcher. From the poems of each selections are 
given, but the chief interests of the book are the 
essays by Miss Lowell that analyze each poet, and 
what he or she stands for. " Here," I said, " is an 
author who takes poetry seriously, a student who 
loves its practice, and understands its message." 

In the last essay I found, to my delight, definite 
statements about the Imagists and Free Verse, sub- 
jects that have an absorbing interest — for the few 
and fit. Learn, obtuse reader, that the Imagists, 
whose works have appeared in the successive volumes 
of the annual anthology Some Imagist Poets, 191 4, 
191 5, 1 91 6, number six, equally divided between 
England and America. The English members are 
Richard Aldington, F. S. Flint, and D. H. Lawrence : 
the Americans are Amy Lowell, John Gould Fletcher 
and the lady who writes under the pseudonym of 
"H. D."— Helen Doolittle, now Mrs. Richard 
Aldington. Thus Imagist poet married Imagist 
poet. How right, as right as the not infrequent 
marriages of London policewomen to London 
policemen. In this fascinating essay Miss Lowell 
prints the six tenets to which the Imagist poets 
have agreed. No. 1 is " To use the language of 
common speech, but to employ always the exact 



196 More Authors and I 

word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative 
word." Also learn, obtuse reader, that vers libre is 
" cadenced verse," that is, " a verse-form based upon 
cadence " ; and, to make an end of this scholastic 
paragraph, " polyphonic prose " is not a prose form. 
Polyphonic means " many- voiced, and the form is 
so called because it makes use of all the voices of 
poetry, viz. metre, vers libre, assonance, alliteration, 
rhyme and return." 

So you see I had begun to treat Miss Amy Lowell, 
as a creative critic, with great respect, and to learn 
much from her. My next step in knowledge and 
admiration was through reading Modern American 
Poetry : an Anthology, by Louis Untermeyer, a book 
that should be in every library. From the section 
on Amy Lowell I learnt that she lives in Brookline, 
Massachusetts, — around her house is a large and 
lovely garden — that James Russell Lowell was a 
cousin of her grandfather, that her mother's father 
was Minister to England, and that her brother, 
Abbott Lawrence Lowell is president of Harvard 
University. I also learnt that after many studious 
European journeys she determined, at the age of 
twenty-eight, to be a poet, and that for eight years 
she served a rigorous and solitary apprenticeship, 
reading the classics of all schools and countries, 
studying the technique of verse, exercising her verbal 
power, but never attempting to publish a single 
line. In 191 2 her first volume of poetry, A Dome 
of Many-Colored Glass, was published. 

Musing over Miss Lowell's arduous apprenticeship 
to poetry — those determined eight years of study — 
there came to memory two lines by Tennyson — 



Amy Lowell 197 



" I do but sing because I must, 
And pipe but as the linnets sing.' 



A year or so passed, and with the exception of a 
few fugitive poems by Miss Amy Lowell in antho- 
logies and periodicals I had no real acquaintance 
with her as poet. Then one of those amazing 
things happened proving that the wind is tempered 
to the shorn lamb. I received a letter from the 
daughter of an American lady living in Kent. I 
was living in Kent too, at a place called Island 
Farm, on the other side of the county. The letter 
begged me to write upon Amy Lowell, and added, 
" Mother has all her books.'' Correspondence 
followed, and it was arranged that I should motor 
with Belinda, half a day's journey, half across Kent, 
and borrow those Amy Lowell books. The visit 
was a beautiful success, and at nightfall we returned 
to Island Farm with a brown-paper parcel. " What," 
said my Dark-eyed Niece, " more books, and we're 
quite out of bacon and sugar." The books were : 
A Dome of Many-Colored Glass ; Sword Blades and 
Poppy Seed ; Men, Women and Ghosts ; Can Grande' s 
Castle ; Pictures of the Floating World and Legends. 

Some of the poems I like immensely, such as 
Patterns, The Painter on Silk, Preparation, to name 
only three ; and I also like this — 

"AN ARTIST 

" The anchorite, Kisen, 
Composed a thousand poems 

And threw nine hundred and ninety-nine into the river. 
Finding one alone worthy of preservation." 



198 More Authors and I 

But do you know — what absurd creatures we critics 
are ! — it is the Prefaces that interest me most, the 
Prefaces wherein Miss Lowell explains what she has 
attempted to do poetically in each volume. 

If I were asked to award a prize for the most 
accomplished and the most competent Encourager 
and Student of Poetry, I should certainly award it 
to Miss Amy Lowell. But a prize for Poetry — oh, 
what absurd creatures we critics are ! 



XXXIV. ARTHUR MACHEN 

THE caprices of Literary Fame arc curious. 
Take the case of Arthur Machen. 

Casually I have known him for years — 
this heavily built man, with the large, genial, yet 
brooding, clean-shaven face, a good companion, I 
think ; but one who keeps many of his thoughts to 
himself. We have never corresponded because I 
have never known his address : he gives it in Who's 
Who, as Carmelite House, Tallis Street, because, I 
suppose, he is (or was) one of the star writers on 
The Evening News, composing articles on anything 
and everything that interests his medieval mind. 

I have met him at public functions ; at the dinner, 
for example, given to the actor-manager, Frank 
Benson, when he was created a knight in 191 6. I 
was there because I wanted to be there. It was a 
privilege to be able to testify to my admiration for 
Benson's service to Shakespeare. Machen was there 
because his variegated career has included member- 
ship, for a time, of the Benson Shakespearean 
Repertoire Company. 

I have met him, too, slouching through the 
interminable corridors of The Evening News offices, 
for I, also, was a writer, signing my name for years, 
in that popular London evening newspaper. But 
our chief and most entertaining encounter happened 
by chance. Rather late on a certain evening I had 

199 



200 More Authors and I 

called to see a new acquaintance who had chambers 
in one of the London Inns of Court. 

I crossed the quadrangle, dimly lighted ; I toiled 
up the stone staircase (such luxuries as elevators and 
stationary baths are unknown) ; peered at the names 
inscribed on the oak door. After a while it was 
opened by — Arthur Machen. My friend was not 
in, but the author of Hieroglyphics and I had some 
good, rapid talk. He is an admirable monologist 
when in the mood (see Hieroglyphics), For some 
reason or another I have a vivid recollection of that 
brief encounter — the open door, the snug room 
beyond, books and a lamp, warmth and stillness, 
and Arthur Machen standing in the passage — smiling 
and talking, ready to talk but also ready to go back 
to his folios. 

These memories I have collected because of certain 
curious literary episodes, relating to Arthur Machen, 
that interested me when I was in America. The 
first began with a letter I received from a stranger, 
Vincent Starrett of Chicago, dated August 3, 191 8. 
My kindly correspondent introduced himself as one 
who is eagerly interested in the London literary 
Eighteen-Nineties, and he wrote to me to say that 
he had just added my " fine feuilleton " (ahem) on 
that epoch, to his Eighteen-Nineties collection. 

His letter proceeded, " My literary god of the 
period — of many periods, indeed, perhaps any ! — is 
Arthur Machen. You mention him not at all. 
Mr. Holbrook Jackson dismisses him with one 
appreciative line, and the rest is — silence. Did not 
anyone beat a drum or blow a bugle for Machen 
in those days ? Was he then, as now, obscure, 



Arthur Machen 201 

unknown, unappreciated ? Or am I quite mad to 
elevate him to a place among the literary ' things ' ? 
This last I will not believe ! Largely through my 
efforts, I am happy to know, he is beginning to be 
read in America — now ; is becoming a ' cult.' But 
why has he never received his due, as I see it ? 
Can you tell me anything about him in those days 
when he wrote his great books — The Hill of Dreams 
and The House of Souls ? 

This letter from Mr. Starrett set me thinking. 
Had I overlooked a genius, missed a real " literary 
thing " ? Had I been so remiss as not to give even 
one line to Arthur Machen in my account of the 
literary personalities of the Eighteen-Nineties who 
had interested me ? At any rate, if I had erred it 
was through ignorance. 

With determination I recalled Arthur Machen's 
" output " as author. Yes, I had read his The 
Great God Pan, which appeared in " The Keynote 
Series." It did not interest me, and I remember 
that I agreed with some critic in some important 
paper (I have since found his actual words in The 
Observer) who said, " It is not Mr. Machen's fault 
but his misfortune, that one shakes with laughter 
rather than with dread over the contemplation of 
his psychological bogey." 

The Hill of Dreams and his volume of tales " in 
the manner of the Renaissance " interested me in 
parts, but they did not make me a Machenite any 
more than reading James Branch Cabell makes me a 
Cabellite. Medievalism, introspection and border- 
land imaginations do not enthrall me, unless done 
by a Pater, a Shorthouse, or a Stevenson. 



202 More Authors and I 

Hieroglyphics is a different matter. It was written 
between 1890 and 1900, but I did not read it until 
two years ago. I went frisking through it like a 
colt in a meadow, enjoying every page; then I 
went back to the beginning and read it all again 
carefully. If anything could make me a Machenite, 
it would be this Hieroglyphics : a Note Upon Ecstasy 
in Literature. It is a monologue on literary valua- 
tions by a supposed " obscure literary hermit " 
(A. M. of course) done with sanity, insight, and 
humour, done at a gallop by this delightful hermit 
who is always " ready to defend the thesis that, all 
the arts being glorious, the literary art is the most 
glorious and wonderful of all." 

It was this " literary hermit " who made that 
fine phrase, which has been much quoted, about 
great literature being composed in a withdrawal 
from life, not a participation in life. There are 
many memorable sayings in Hieroglyphics. I shall 
give myself the pleasure of copying out two. 

" If ecstasy be present, then I say there is fine 
literature, if it be absent, then, in spite of all the 
cleverness, all the talents, all the workmanship and 
observation and dexterity you may show me, then, 
I think we have a product (possibly a very interest- 
ing one) which is not fine literature. . . . We have 
tracked Ecstasy by many strange paths, in divers 
strange disguises, but I think that now, and only now, 
we have discovered its full and perfect definition. 
For Artifice is of Time, but Art is of Eternity." 

Hieroglyphics will never be, I fear, a " best seller " ; 
but, strange to relate, Arthur Machen has written a 
" best seller." That was The Bowmen, a short story, 



Arthur Machen 203 

entirely imaginary, that lie published in The Evening 
News on September 29, 191 4. It has since been 
republished in a volume with three other legends 
of the war, and an Introduction by the author 
explaining how he came to write The Bowmen. 
This tale is still echoing around the world : soldiers, 
nurses, and others are still maintaining that they 
actually saw St. George and his Agincourt bowmen 
intervene, repulse the Germans, and save the British 
Army. Mr. Machen states and restates his case, 
that the story was his own invention, but many 
continue to believe, and will continue to believe, 
that it really happened. 

When I speak, in general company, of Arthur 
Machen someone always says, " Oh yes, he wrote 
The Bowmen " ; but it is the Machen cult people 
who interest me — Vincent Starrett, who wrote a 
long article about him in Reefy s Mirror, and has 
since republished it, with additions, in a little book, 
an extravagant book, I think ; but Mr. Starrett is 
pardoned because of his whole-hearted admiration 
and frank hero-worship. Then there was the pro- 
fessor at a w r ell-known American University who, 
learning that I could only obtain one of our author's 
books at my New York Branch Public Library, at 
once loaned me his Machen collection. Finally, 
there is the lady who became a Machen enthusiast 
through reading his Introduction to Arthur Middle- 
ton's volume of stories called The Ghost Ship. 
Machen is almost as enthusiastic about Middleton 
as Starrett is about Machen. I cannot get excited 
about either. Are my temperate enthusiasms leaving 
me behind in the literary race ? 



204 More Authors and I 

Arthur Machen is good at a Preface, and his 
humour is of the nice kind that can laugh at him- 
self in retrospection. Yesterday I bought the new 
edition of The Great God Pan, for the sake of his 
Introduction explaining why and how he wrote it. 
Oh, but he is a jolly fellow, for he reprints at the 
end all the nasty reviews, including the one that I 
quoted above from The Observer ; the last one is 
from The Westminster, which ends "... innocuous 
from its absurdity." And then Machen likens him- 
self to a man " who finds a crushed flower or a leaf 
in an old book that he has not opened for years " — 
and all is well. It was Beethoven who, when he 
found himself in a quandary, gave a hearty laugh in 
the bass, and passed on to another theme. 

I think Arthur Machen takes himself less seriously 
than do his admirers. Which is well. 

" Arthur Machen," said the lady whom I had 
been bidden to take in to dinner, " he wrote The 
Bowmen, didn't he ? It's all very well for him to 
deny it, but I know a man, who knew an airman, 
who knew a soldier who himself saw St. George and 
the Bowmen. And why shouldn't they have inter- 
vened ? Why not ? " 

I have yet to read Arthur Machen's latest book, 
The Secret Glory. 



XXXV. WALTER DE LA MARE 

AN author's friends on the press are not always 
his best friends. Their action toward him 
is not necessarily the author's fault. It may 
be entirely the fault of his friends. 

For weeks, for months, I read advance paragraphs 
about Walter de la Mare's romance called Memoirs 
of a Midget. Would he finish it in time for the 
summer publishing season ? could so exacting and 
conscientious a writer deliver it to his publisher 
without further revision ? must the public wait 
another six months for Walter de la Mare's " master- 
piece " ? And so on, and so on. 

Why this excitement about an author, an exclusive, 
shy author, of whom not one-half of one per cent. 
of the general public has ever heard ? Miss Ethel 
Dell is known to a thousand, to ten thousand people, 
where Walter de la Mare is known to one. Why, 
when Memoirs of a Midget was published, was it 
reviewed immediately in half a dozen papers at 
great length, and with an abundance of praise, and 
comparisons with the classics of the world, in this 
genre, that must have bewildered readers who had 
never heard of this author ? An acquaintance of 
mine who perused doggedly one of these long, 
enthusiastic reviews, and who likes to think that he 
is well in the literary movement, went straight — 
hotly, hurriedly, shamefacedly — to the Kensington 

205 



206 More Authors and 

Public Library and asked for — " Any book you have 
in by Walter de la Mare." This answer was returned 
to him, " We have nothing under that name," and 
the librarian added, " We have A Practical French 
Grammar by De Larmoyer. Is that what you 
want ? " 

The answer to the above questions is simple. 
Walter de la Mare is a poet, a Georgian poet, 
indeed Edmund Gosse, himself a poet, remarks that 
Walter de la Mare " started the rich harvest of the 
Georgians." The Georgian poets consort together : 
they admire one another (modern poets have to do 
this or they would hardly be known outside pub- 
lishing circles), and so when Memoirs of a Midget 
was published, those poets in the de la Mare set 
who have the ear of editors, indeed two or^three 
are editors themselves, set to work to write these 
flattering reviews that fluttered down upon us on 
" the day of publication." 

I do not suggest for an instant that these poet 
reviewers were doing what they should not do. 
They admire, I am sure, the work, in verse and 
prose, of their fellow-poet immensely, and I too am 
an admirer of Walter de la Mare, but when I saw 
the avalanche of praise rushing at me I turned 
aside, and purchased Memoirs of a Midget, which is, 
of course, what the poet reviewers wanted their 
readers to do. 

It is a book of 365 pages of smallish type, and 
purports to be the analysis of the feelings, thoughts, 
impressions and attitude toward life, until her 
twenty-first year or so, of a diminutive person 
called Miss M. She is small, she is tiny (I wish her 



Walter de la Mare 207 

dimensions had been given on the title-page), she is 
a kind of human fairy, and she is quite lovable and 
fascinating, but there is too much of her for my 
taste. I confess that I began to skip, for there is a 
limit to my interest in the innermost feelings of a 
midget, even when she has quite a Jane Austen- 
Bronte facility for characterizing the people she 
meets and making them live. I find that I enjoy 
this book most when I read a page here and a page 
there very carefully two or three times, for it is 
Mr. de la Mare's style, insight, interest in and 
affection for all little manifestations of nature and 
humanity that compose his charm. 

Here is his poem called " The Scribe " — 

" What lovely things 

Thy hand hath made : 
The smooth-plumed bird 

In its emerald shade, 
The seed of the grass, 

The speck of stone 
Which the wayfaring ant 

Stirs — and hastes on ! 
Though I should sit 

By some tarn in Thy hills, 
Using its ink 

As the spirit wills 
To write of Earth's wonders, 

Its live, willed things, 
Flit would the ages 

On soundless wings 
Ere unto Z 

My pen drew nigh ; 
Leviathan told, 

And the honey-fly ; 
And still would remain 

My wit to try — 



208 More Authors and I 

My worn reeds broken, 

The dark tarn dry, 
All words forgotten — 

Thou, Lord, and I." 

I do not suppose that Walter de la Mare will like 
this article any more than he likes the spreading 
praises of his poet friends. For he is a retiring man, 
more at home in a garden than in a club, and it is 
not his fault that Memoirs of a Midget has been 
boomed. 

His first book, published in 1902, was Songs of 
Childhood : he began to be known, to a limited 
public, as the Poet of Childhood — 

" Child, do you love the flower 
A-shine with colour and dew 
Lighting its transient hour ? 
So I love you." 

In the newest Golden Treasury Series, A Book of 
English Verse on Infancy and Childhood^ I find two 
child poems by him. Indeed, he is in all the 
Anthologies of the day. Most of the Anthologists 
quote poems from The Listeners of 191 2, which is, I 
suppose, his most popular volume. 

" ' Is there anybody there ? ' said the Traveller, 

Knocking on the moonlit door : 
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses 

Of the forest's ferny floor : 
And a bird flew up out of the turret, 

Above the Traveller's head : 
And he smote upon the door a second time ; 

' Is there anybody there ? ' he said." 

But the poem I like best is that called " The 
Englishman," eighteen stanzas, direct, strange, full 
of a kind of mystical realism. 



Walter de la Mare 209 

M ' England ! ' he whisp id harsh, 

1 Kngland ! ' repeated he, 
And briar, and rose, and mavis, 
\- -inging in yon high tree : 

1 Ye speak me true, my leetle son, 
So — so, it came to me, 

A-drifting landwards on a spar, 
And grey dawn on the tea. 

. ay, I could not be mistook ; 
I knew them leafy trees, 
I knew that land so witchery sweet, 
And that old noise of seas.' " 

Good poets always write good prose, and Walter 
de la Mare's prose books have something in them — 
cadence, rhythm, witchery — that places them some- 
where between prose and poetry. They are literary 
books, but they have an intensity of observation, 
and a delving into a kind of fairy-land, real, unreal, 
that takes them quite out of the category of affected 
literary books. A less affected writer hardly lives, 
and although Tommy Atkins would not make 
much of Henry Brocken and The Three Mulla- 
Mulgars, there are sensitives who find in these 
books immense delight. 

If what I have written about Walter de la Mare 
interests you and, if before acquiring his complete 
works, you feel disposed to sample his method, 
manner and material, let me recommend a small, 
inexpensive volume in " The King's Treasuries of 
Literature," edited by Sir A. T. Quiller-Couch and 
called Story and Rhyme : a Selection from the Writings 
oj Walter de la Mare, Chosen by the Author. 

I doubt if a poet has ever before been asked to 



2io More Authors and I 






compile an Anthology, in verse and prose, from his 
published writings, and when I recall how hard 
John Davidson, Lionel Johnson, H. D. Lowry, and 
others found it to obtain a hearing, I am delighted 
that the Georgian poets have realized the virtue of 
teamwork. Their praise may sometimes be exces- 
sive, but over-praise is better than no praise at all. 

Maybe Walter de la Mare is like a learned and 
retiring scholar of my acquaintance who, when an 
enthusiastic reviewer praised his magnum opus to the 
skies, remarked, " How very beastly." 



XXXVI. CHARLES MARRIOTT 

" A ND so they came to the Thousand Islands." 
jfV Somebody wrote that, somebody who 
had cruised among the Thousand Islands 
of the St. Lawrence River. I have forgotten who 
said it, I have forgotten in what book it was said, 
but the line has remained in my memory — " And 
so they came to the Thousand Islands." By the 
by, there are really 1612 islands. They were counted 
when the Treaty of Ghent was being prepared. 

It was dawn : we had steamed away from Kingston 
on the Canadian side ; we had passed out of Lake 
Ontario, and we were now in the St. Lawrence 
River, which flows for 940 miles to the ocean. I 
returned to my berth, for the wind was chill, watched 
the broadening river through the porthole, noted 
that the still clouds presaged a windless morning, 
and then consulted the map. Soon we should be 
among the Thousand Islands ; then we would reach 
Prescott, where I had been told by an amiable 
seaman that we must change boats, as the large 
pleasure steamer, like a great white bird, into which 
we were crowded, was too unwieldy to shoot the 
rapids. We must exchange into a smaller, blunter, 
flatter boat which cared not for the whirlpools, nor 
the nine navigable rapids with a total fall of some 
209 feet, which we must descend before we make 
Montreal about sundown. It was really rather 

211 



212 More Authors and I 

exciting and adventurous, in anticipation ; a minor 
adventure, and in thinking about it I thought of 
Charles Marriott. 

Why? 

Well, whenever I go forth upon an adventure a 
little more spirited than the routine of ordinary life 
I think of Charles Marriott. He it was who gave 
me a taste for the wild — finding the way by compass, 
sleeping in uncomfortable inns, and even seeking in 
squaggy bogs the source of a river. Together, on a 
walking tour round Cornwall, we tracked, and found, 
on a remote moor, the source of the Tamar : that 
is, he found it. He is more expert in such matters 
than I. Together we studied the ways and customs 
of the detached and silent Cornishmen who for 
centuries were cut off from the rest of England by 
the River Tamar, and who still call the residents of 
Devonshire and the rest of England " foreigners." 
Together we discussed stories about Cornwall and 
Cornishmen : he writes them. 

Charles Marriott is not a Cornishman by birth. 
He is descended from Flemish refugees, who settled 
in Essex in the sixteenth century. He, I think, 
comes from the midlands : after leaving school he 
spent two years at the National Art Training College, 
South Kensington, meaning, I suppose, to be an 
artist. It was not to be. Manifestly his career was 
literature, but not yet. He dallied with chemistry 
and photography, did a little drawing and paint- 
ing, and in his leisure hours wrote a remarkable 
book. 

Well do I remember the interest that The Column, 
his first work, published in 1901, aroused in literary 



Charles Marriott 213 

circles. It was " written." I use this word in the 
way one describes a book by Stevenson, Henley or 
(Juillcr-Couch as ' w written," that is, it was a work 
of art — shaped, finished, done with an air, and per- 
haps more closely related to literature than to life. 
It was romantic, not realistic : the characters were 
natural, and they behaved naturally ; but they were 
the kind of people that, if you do not meet them 
every day, you hope some day to meet. 

The scene of The Column was laid in Cornwall, 
and it was this book that first aroused my interest 
in the Delectable Duchy, and sent me, year after 
year, whenever I could escape from London, to 
Cornwall, there to write and paint, to take long 
walks, seeking the prehistoric monuments, and to 
watch the Atlantic waves beating against the granite 
cliffs. 

At St. Ives, where Marriott wrote The Column, 
there was a colony of painters and writers. He 
worked in a little house perched on the cliff, and I 
think that he must have been very pleased with the 
success The Column achieved in London. 

Sidney Colvin, who had done so much for R. L. 
Stevenson, wrote enthusiastically about The Column, 
and it was chiefly owing to him that this first book 
by a new writer was launched into success. A great 
future was prophesied for Charles Marriott, and 
from his little house on the Cornish cliff he proceeded 
to send out into the great world, year after year, 
stones, travel books and essays which writers and 
literary persons read with delight, but which, I 
fear, were somewhat too well-written and too 
fastidious for the general public. 



214 More Authors and I 

To me a new book by Charles Marriott is always 
a keen intellectual treat. Well do I remember the 
pleasure that The House on the Sands, Genevra, Now, 
The Dezvpond, The Unpetitioned Heavens and Subsoil 
gave me. He never truckled to the groundlings : 
he proceeded on his austere, sensitive way, and he 
was one of the few writers who understood art, and 
who could make an artist think and act like an 
artist. 

His books were mainly about Cornwall. He 
seemed so definitely an integral part of Cornwall 
that it was a shock one day to learn that he had 
been caught by the lure of London, and that he 
was leaving Cornwall to take up a position as art 
critic of the St. James's Gazette. He continued to 
write uncommon and delightful novels ; but I had 
to get used to greeting his alert, pioneer face, not 
on the trackless moors above Zennor, not on the 
cliff path that leads from Sennen Cove round by 
Land's End to Lamorna, but in London picture 
galleries, and on the sophisticated pavement of Bond 
Street. But he seemed to be quite happy, and 
when the war broke out, and he joined the staff of 
the Censor's Office, which meant long, regular hours 
and little leisure, he seemed to be happier than 
ever. One day I asked him why, and he answered, 
with a smile : " Because now I am in receipt of a 
regular income." 

I found that in his case regular pay was good for 
literature. He wrote better than ever. An article 
signed C. M. became an attractive asset to a paper, 
and it was plain that when he cared to resume 
regular novel writing accompanied by irregular 



Charles Marriott 215 

remuneration lie would plough a wider, deeper 
furrow. 

" . . . And so they came to the Thousand 
Islands." We began to count them ; we said — 
" How lovely ! How picturesque ! " We pushed 
into and discommoded each other in the desire to 
see more islands. But when I had counted up to 
fifty I retired from the game, sought a chair and a 
book, from which I was presently roused by the 
command to change boats preparatory to shooting 
the first rapids. 

We shot them. It was nearly as exciting as 
crossing Forty-Second Street, New York, on a 
matinee day. Then we stopped at a place called — 
Cornwall. 

What Cornishman, I wonder, gave to this riverside 
town on the St. Lawrence the name of Cornwall ? 
" Well," I said to myself, " I shall have something 
to tell Charles Marriott when next we cross the 
Tamar into Cornwall." And I will tell him, too, 
that, as we shot rapid after rapid, and saw here and 
there a solitary figure in a solitary canoe, feeling 
and finding his way down the river, I thought of 
" The Canadian Boat Song." How does it go ? 

11 Row, brothers, row, the stream runs fast, 
The rapids are near, and the daylight's past." 

And of that yearning stanza that has sung itself 
into the hearts of so many exiles — 

" From the low shieling of the distant island 
Mountains divide us and a waste of seas, 
But still our hearts are young, our hearts are Highland, 
And we in dreams behold the Hebrides." 



2i 6 More Authors and I 

And shall I suggest to C. M. that, as he has 
written so prettily and wittily about the Rhine, he 
should next write about the St. Lawrence, and raise 
a literary monument to him who founded Cornwall 

there ? 



XXXVII. H. B. MARRIOTT-WATSON 

MARRIOTT-WATSON was a Romantic. In 
his books he rarely fingered actual life. 
For some reason or another the eighteenth 
century took possession of him, and from studying 
it he acquired a style vivid, but of extreme artifice. 
This manufactured style never quite left him. He 
lived by his pen. He wrote sword and cloak novels 
with occasional incursions into modern life, but he 
could not acquire the instinct, the flair which Robert 
Louis Stevenson possessed. Marriott-Watson was 
second even to Anthony Hope. He was so clever a 
man that he could master the technique, but he 
did not seem able to breathe life into his technique. 

I knew him well. Indeed, we lived together for 
two years, and I have often watched his way of 
working. He would sit in a deep chair for hours, 
biting his lips, and frowning, planning an article or 
a chapter ; then he would rise, stalk to his desk and 
write at a rapid rate in his small, thick handwriting. 
He was a man more than six feet tall, with a great 
bushy head of hair. Somebody said that he looked 
like an Assyrian king, but that his hair was neither 
curled nor scented. His great height seemed to 
hold him aloof from the give and take of the world ; 
his well-stored brain and quick fancy played con- 
tinually with the modes and manners of a past day. 

He was born in Australia. When a boy he was 
217 



218 More Authors and I 

taken by his father to New Zealand. In 1885 he 
visited London with his father, and " decided that 
London was too good a place to leave." In his 
own phrase he " took up journalism." That was 
in 1887. I do not know quite what he meant by 
" taking up journalism," for he was quite an unlikely 
journalist. He had no scent for news, and no interest 
in ephemera. I believe he sent correspondence to 
Australian papers, but I never heard him mention 
the word politics, and he was little interested in 
the matters that concern most journalists. In his 
own way he was rather other-worldly, interested in 
stars, visions founded on fact, and daring speculations. 

When I first knew him, he was living, or rather 
he had a study on the ground floor of a house in 
Mecklenberg Square, Bloomsbury, with an ambition 
to make a guinea a day by writing. He found it 
difficult, for his style was not persuasive, and he 
was interested in thoughts and things that the 
ordinary reader of newspapers does not trouble him- 
self about. Frederick Greenwood, who was then 
editing the St. James's Gazette, gave him more or 
less regular work, and it was about this time that 
his first novel Marahuna was accepted, but I do not 
fancy that it had much success. Marriott-Watson 
was a fine writer in a queer, stilted, scholarly, 
up-in-the-clouds way, but he was never popular. 
Himself the sweetest, gentlest of creatures, never 
angry, usually amused, he had no sympathy with 
any kind of violence. Yet he loved to write about 
gallant " Galloping Dick," highwaymen, ladies with 
dark eyes and noble natures, and bucks. 

One of his earliest London friends was J. M. Barrie. 



H. B. Marriott-Watson 219 

They wrote a play together on Richard Savage, the 
poet, which failed. There was nothing of the real 
Barrie in this youthful drama. I was at the first 
performance. I have forgotten all about the play, 
but retain a vivid recollection of these two, then, 
young authors when they were called before the 
curtain by their friends — one so tall and shaggy, the 
other so small and wan. Mutt and Jeff are not in 
the least like Barrie and Marriott-Watson, but I 
never see Mutt and Jeff in a picture, standing side 
by side, but I think of Barrie and Marriott-Watson 
taking the call after the performance of Richard 
Savage, so shy, so unversed in taking calls. 

When the Scots Observer was started, Marriott- 
Watson became one of Henley's young men, and I 
shall always hold that he did his best work under 
Henley's influence. For months, indeed I believe 
for two or three years, he published a weekly article 
in the Scots Observer and National Observer. Some 
of them have since been collected in Diogenes of 
Loudon, and I think in At the First Corner. They 
were exercises in romantic writing, brisk, unreal and 
fantastic. The general public, I am sure, made 
nothing of them, but we of the Scots and the National 
Observer considered them fine. They quite made 
Marriott-Watson's name in those inner literary 
circles where the Scots and National Observer were 
regarded as the last word in good writing and straight 
thinking. I have been reading Diogenes of London 
lately and find that I have quite fallen out of the 
way of such writing. It has no simplicity, no real 
intimacy ; it is not life : it is lamp and desk writing, 
but a powerful writer holds the pen. 



220 More Authors and I 

When the Honourable Waldorf Astor, as he then 
was, acquired the Pall Mall Gazette and the Pall 
Mall Budget, and started the Magazine, Marriott- 
Watson was appointed assistant-editor of the Gazette. 
He could write on anything, and because he could 
write on anything his articles on anything lacked 
conviction ; but they were clever and he was very 
popular in the office. He and I were living together 
in St. John's Wood at the time, and the drawback 
to being on an evening paper was that he was 
obliged to have his breakfast at half-past six each 
morning, and journey to the office in a cab, which 
was at the door punctually at seven. Sometimes I 
would have breakfast with Marriott, and he was 
wont to remark, " You are the only man in the 
world who can be cheerful at a 6.30 a.m. breakfast." 
Later on he became assistant editor of Black and 
White, the pictorial weekly, that essayed to rival 
the Graphic and the Illustrated London News". With 
his great facility, Marriott- Watson turned easily from 
articles to pictures. 

Some time after this he married " Graham R. 
Tomson," the poet, and they settled at Sheer in 
Surrey. He wrote occasional journalistic articles, 
but most of his time was spent in novel writing, 
which became a kind of profession to him. I was 
delighted to read, in one of the notices of his life, 
this statement : " Many of his books, including The 
Skirts of Happy Chance, The King's Highway, 
Rosalind in Arden, and The House in the Downs, 
have a multitude of grateful readers." I was glad 
to learn this, for I must admit that I have only 
read two of Marriott-Watson's forty-two novels, his 



H. B. Marriott-Watson 221 

first, Marabuna, and Galloping Dick. It seems a 
pity that so line and well-stored and inventive an 
intelligence could find no profitable outlet but 
fiction. So it is. Is the writing of novels the only 
marketable form of literary production that a man 
like Marriott-Watson can turn his hand to ? I 
suppose so. He never talked about what he was 
doing, so I have no means of judging whether he 
enjoyed producing this long series of romantic books. 
Occasionally he tried his hand at a novel of modern 
life, as in The Flower of the Heart. He was also a 
deft hand at the making of short stories, some of 
which dealt with his memories of life in New 
Zealand. 

I am inclined to moralize over his torrent of 
forty-two novels. But why ? It was his method 
of earning a living. His recreations were gardening, 
and taking long walks with his dog. I have a happy 
recollection of the last time I saw him. Belinda 
and I were motoring through Surrey, and I said, 
" Let us stop at Sheer and see the Marriott- 
Watsons." Hardly were the words uttered when 
he appeared, striding down the hillside, his dog at 
his heels. He was just the same, just the Marriott 
of the old days, and when I asked, " What are you 
doing so far from home ? " " Oh," he replied, " I'm 
thinking out a plot, I can do it much better when 
walking." We left him striding across the heather 
and made our way to his house. His wife was 
shelling peas in the garden, and by her side were 
sheets of paper and a pencil. I told her that we 
had met Marriott walking, but that he was really 
thinking out a plot. " Yes," she replied. " And I 



222 More Authors and I 

am ostensibly shelling peas, but I'm really making a 
poem," and she pointed to the sheets of paper, 
lying on the daisies, a little blown about by the 
breeze. 

Those are my pictorial memories of these two. 
He, striding across the heather, thinking out a plot : 
she sitting in her garden shelling peas, and composing 
a poem. 



XXXVIII. HERMAN MELVILLE 

THERE may be fifty, there may be five hundred, 
literary folk who, during the past two or 
three years, have experienced a literary thrill, 
a rich discovery in their first reading of Herman 
Melville. I am one of them. Why I should not 
have read him before I do not know. Oh, yes, I do ! 
The reason is that I had not heard of him. 

He came to my knowledge first through a long 
article in the Dublin Review on Herman Melville, 
by Miss Viola Meynell. I read it with astonishment 
and delight, for I love enthusiasm. Writing of Moby 
Dick, Miss Meynell said, " Herman Melville has 
here endowed human nature with writing that I 
believe to be absolutely unsurpassed. To read it 
and absorb it is the crown of one's reading life. . . . 
It is the wildest, farthest kind of genius." There is 
much more in the article, equally intense and fervid, 
in praise of Herman Melville. This was the more 
remarkable as Melville, as a writer, was a man of 
rushing action and actual experiences the world 
over, the very antithesis of Miss Meynell's quiet, 
cloistral, sensitive writing, akin to Jane Austen, not 
without humour, but without Jane's constant play 
of satiric and kindly rippling mirth. 

Well, it was my duty and pleasure to discover 
something about this newly famous American author, 
who was born in New York City in 1819, of mixed 

223 



224 More Authors and I 

Dutch and English stock. He went to sea as cabin 
boy ; returning to America he became usher in a 
school ; then to sea again in a whaling vessel. Not 
liking the conditions he " jumped ship " with a 
companion, and lived for a time in the vale of 
Typee in the Marquesan group of islands. Escaping 
from what was really captivity, after many other 
adventures, he left the sea and lived on shore in 
New York, and also near Pittsville, writing the 
amazing books that now, after long neglect, are 
agitating literary circles. 

I believe some of them are still unknown, even un- 
published. Here is a list that has been compiled by 
Mr. John Billson, " perhaps the only man in England 
possessing the whole of his printed works " : Moby 
Dick, Typee, Mardi, Omoo, Redburn, White Jacket, 
Israel Potter (sometimes published as The Refugee), 
The Confidence Man, Pierre, Piazza Tales. And in 
poetry : Clarel, Battle Pieces, and John Marr. 

Recently I have read for the first time two 
of his books, Moby Dick or The Whale, being his 
adventures on an American whaling boat sailing 
from Nantucket, and Typee, being his adventures 
in the vale of Typee in the Marquesan Islands. 
It is almost impossible to describe the rush, gusto, 
insight and eloquence of these two astonishing books. 
Melville takes the bit of prose between his teeth 
and rushes away with it, at such a pace that the 
reader finds it difficult to keep up with him. His 
eloquence is extraordinary ; he seems to have no 
desire but rapturously to express himself, and to 
scatter his knowledge of everything that pertains to 
the subjects engrossing him. These are hardly works 



Herman Melville 225 

of fiction ; they arc descriptions of his own wonder- 
ful adventures in the wonderful parts of the world 
that he visited ; of the strange types he met, from 
a Quaker whaling captain to a savage who knows 
no tongue but his own. The many characters are 
touched in with insight and characterization, and 
with a prolixity that both charms and fatigues the 
reader. His characters are not the clear-cut indi- 
viduals that we meet in the pages of our great 
novelists ; they sprawl ; they come and go ; they 
arc quite credible, but I always know that I am 
seeing them, not objectively, but through Melville's 
quick, deep and unresting eyes. 

These books have little in them of the " con- 
struction " that we have learned from the French 
in the art of writing. He interrupts his narrative 
with pages and pages of disquisition on some subject 
that cuts into the story, or suddenly presents itself 
to him. Apparently he forgets nothing that he has 
read, or seen, or heard. After reading Moby Dick, 
which is the name of a gigantic white Leviathan 
who roams the waters and remains unconquered, 
we know the entire history of the whale. It is 
astonishing. Here is a passage taken almost at 
random — 

" To a landsman, no whale, nor any sign of a 
herring, would have been visible at that moment ; 
nothing but a troubled bit of greenish-white water, 
and thin scattered puffs of vapour hovering over it, 
and suffusingly blowing off to leeward, like the 
confused scud from white rolling billows. The air 
around suddenly tingled and vibrated, as it were, 
like the air over intensely heated plates of iron. 
Q 



226 More Authors and I 

Beneath this atmospheric waving and curling, and 
partially beneath a thin layer of water also, the 
whales were swimming." 

In Typee he interpolates a disquisition on the 
bread-fruit tree which sustains the islanders. This 
description, extracted from the narrative, would make 
an important article in any magazine of to-day. 
Here is a passage from Typee that seems to recall 
legends of the Golden Age — 

" With the one solitary exception of striking a 
light, I scarcely saw any piece of work performed 
there which caused the sweat to stand upon a single 
brow. As for digging and delving for a livelihood, 
the thing is altogether unknown. Nature had 
planted the bread-fruit and the banana, and in her 
own good time she brings them to maturity, when 
the idle savage stretches forth his hand, and satisfies 
his appetite." 

I shall certainly read his other books. On this 
subject a correspondent, a stranger, who writes to 
me enthusiastically about Moby Dick, adds, " I am 
told that some of his latest books are almost un- 
readable, but I have often wondered whether the 
thoughts contained in them were too advanced for 
the day in which they were written, whether 
they would, in consequence, be better appreciated 
to-day." 

It seems that during his lifetime there were some 
who appreciated Melville's genius. One of them 
was Nathaniel Hawthorne, and another was James 
Thomson, the English poet, and in more modern 
times, R. L. Stevenson and C. W. Stoddard. 
Writing to Hawthorne, Herman Melville said, " I 



Herman Melville 227 

have come to regard this matter of fame as the 
most transparent of all vanities. I read Solomon 
more and more, and every time see deeper, and 
deeper, and unspeakable meanings in him. I did 
not think of fame a year ago, as I do now. My 
development has been all within a few years past." 

Fame has certainly come to him now. Moby 
Dick was first published in New York in 185 1. In 
England it was first issued as The Whale, in a three- 
volume expurgated edition in 1871. In " The 
World's Classics " it was first published in 1920. 
It is this " World's Classics " edition that we have 
all been reading. On the cover is this extract from 
the Athenceum, " One of the world's great books." 

It was in the Athenceum that Augustine Birrell 
expressed his great admiration for the author of 
Moby Dick. He tells us that he owed his first 
introduction to Melville to u that exquisite judge 
of a good book, Sir Alfred Lyall, who was shocked 
at my ignorance, and most emphatically urged me 
to read Omoo and Typee ; but as luck would have 
it he did not specially dwell upon Moby DickP 

The London Nation has devoted pages to Herman 
Melville. One of the most interesting episodes there 
recorded was the publication of a series of letters 
written between 1884 and 1888 from Melville, who 
was then living at East Twenty-Sixth Street, New 
York, to Mr. James Billson. The reason of these let- 
ters is thus explained by Mr. Billson : " Finding much 
difficulty in discovering the titles of his works, I 
adopted the simple course of writing direct to the 
author, and with the help he gave me I was ulti- 
mately able to own nearly all his published works." 



228 More Authors and I 

There was also an interesting brief biography of 
Herman Melville by Frank Jewett Mather, Jr. in 
the Review of New York for August 9, 1919- 

An important life of Herman Melville has recently 
been published. The author is Prof. R. M. Weaver 
of the Department of English at Columbia Univer- 
sity. The author had access to a considerable body 
of biographical material — letters, journals, legal 
documents and unpublished manuscripts — including 
a sea novel finished in 1891. 

Herman Melville has, at last, indeed, come into 
his kingdom. 




XXXIX. ALFRED NOYES 

1CALL Alfred Noyes our Ambassador for Poetry. 
Most poets are lonely, self-centred folk, 
intimately engaged in expressing themselves. 
Alfred Noyes seems really to have taken on the 
delightful duty of explaining and popularizing 
poetry to the English-speaking world. Again and 
again have I heard him in America, again and again 
have I heard him in England, lecture on poetry, 
explain to embryo poets and others how it should 
be read aloud, and read his own poems to appre- 
ciative audiences. He recites his verses for the 
simple reason that he loves to compose them and to 
read them aloud. Because he enjoys this ardour, 
his audience enjoys it also. He reads with the 
easiness of a bird singing. 

It was encouraging to observe the large audience 
that filled the Haymarket Theatre when he took 
the platform on behalf of the Poetry Society. He 
spoke several of his own poems, and as the way he 
speaks them is part of his propaganda, I may say a 
word about it. 

He loathes gesture and dramatic manifestations ; 
he holds that poetry should sing itself, and that 
when one is reciting another poet, one should do no 
more than try to express the meaning and the 
music of that poet. Rhythm, he maintains, is not 
an artificial method of speech. Rhythm enters into 

229 



230 More Authors and I 

and sways speech. The emotion itself should be so 
deep that it will pass beyond the ordinary sound of 
prose speech and rise into universal rhythm. I once 
heard him read Tennyson's " Break, Break, Break." 
The music of his intonation fitted the music of the 
poem. 

Mr. Noyes is a sane poet. People accustomed to 
the stagey, long-haired poet are surprised to see a 
youngish man — clean-shaven, athletic, alert, smiling, 
standing easily upon the platform, and speaking 
poems as if he enjoyed it quite as much as two 
other recreations he affects — rowing and swimming. 
He seems to know all his poems by heart. The 
books are before him, but he rarely refers to them ; 
he just runs on rhythmically, like a brook. 

The poems he spoke at the Haymarket Meeting 
of the Poetry Society were : " The Old Grey 
Squirrel," " A Song of the Trawlers," " The Com- 
panion of a Mile," " An Attempt to Sketch a May 
Tree," " The Elfin Artist," " The Victory Dance," 
and a few of his delightful efforts to bring Touch- 
stone to life in modern London, showing that he 
has humour as well as narrative power, and lyric 
fervour. Long after the recital was over I found 
myself repeating — 

" At Melford town, at Melford town, at little grey-roofed Melford 
town, 
A long mile from Sudbury, upon the village green . . " 

and — 

" As I came home by Sudbury, by little red-roofed Sudbury . . ." 

When I speak of Mr. Noyes as an Ambassador for 
Poetry, I speak by the book. Last season, besides 



Alfred Noyes 231 

his lectures in London, he visited, on behalf of the 
Poetry Society, Liverpool, Stoke-on-Trent, Clifton, 
Bath, and other cities, and from reports that I have 
read, he seems to be received everywhere with 
friendliness and fervour. If one could find an artist 
with the same fervour about painting as Mr. Noyes 
has about poetry, the condition of painting would 
improve. He has written many magazine articles, 
but the production and the propagation of poetry 
is the object of his days. He has even gone so far 
as to say that the sonnet may contain all the facts 
of life that are found in the long novel. 

I suppose Mr. Noyes is quite willing that I should 
call him old-fashioned. Perhaps it would be simpler 
to say that he is wedded to the classical tradition 
and dislikes modern developments of Free Verse, 
and all things masquerading under the name of 
poetry, that do not scan, and rhyme, and sing 
themselves. In his latest volume he permits himself 
this " cheery sneer." 

" Come and see the silly clown that wears a red rose ! 
Roses are green now, as everybody knows." 

Once a poet, always a poet ; but few moderns 
are such systematic pursuers of poetry as Alfred 
Noyes. He was writing it when he came down 
from Oxford, and he has published volumes regularly 
since his first success, The Loom of Tears, 1902, and 
the Flower of Old Japan, a tale in verse that followed 
it in 1903. Someone has said of him, "He is 
quickly responsive, his song flows as easily as a 
thrush's after rain." That is perfectly true, and 
since that is essential Alfred Noyes, it is foolish to 



232 More Authors and I 

bewail that he has not the intellectual concentration, 
thought wrought into thought of, say, Alice Mevnell. 
His muse has not changed much. Here is a stanza 
from his earliest book, The Loom of Tears — 

" For what had I to do with love 
Of aught on earth that trod 
When all the stars that wheeled above 
Shone with the love of God ? " 

Here is one from his latest book, The Elfin Artist 
and Other Poems — 

" ' If I could whisper you all I know,' 

Said the Old Fool in the Wood, 
' You'd never say that green leaves " grow," 

You'd say, " Ah, what a happy mood 
The Master must be in to-day, 

To think such thoughts," 
That's what you'd say.' " 

Of all his works, the one that I like best, and that 
I can read again and again, with gusto, is Tales of 
the Mermaid Tavern^ wherein the great figures of 
Shakespeare's time appear, and talk, and sing, and 
play, and gossip. Well do I remember the joy I 
had in crooning the Mermaid yarns aloud to myself 
when they first appeared, serially, in the pages of 
Blackwood's Magazine, Who has not been inspired 
by the idea of the Merchant Adventurers ? Here 
is the beginning of a song about them — 

" Marchaunt Adventurers, chaunting at the windlass, 

Early in the morning, we slipped from Plymouth Sound, 
All for Adventure in the great New Regions, 
All for Eldorado and to sail the world around. 



- 



Alfred Noyes 233 

Sing ! the red of sunrise ripples round the bows again ! 

Marchaunt Adventurers, O sing, we're outward bound, 
All to stuff the sunset in our old black galleon, 

All to seek the merchandise that no man ever found.'" 

Here is the beginning of Section Two of the Tales 
of the Mermaid Tavern — 

" Some three nights later, thro' the thick brown fog 
A link-boy, dropping flakes of crimson fire, 
Flared to the door and, through its glowing frame, 
Ben Jonson and Kit Marlowe, arm in arm, 
Swaggered into the Mermaid Inn." 

Would you like a glimpse of Shakespeare ; — 

" And, as he leaned to Drayton, droning thus, 
I saw a light gleam of celestial mirth 
Flit o'er the face of Shakespeare — scarce a smile — 
A swift irradiation from within 
As of a cloud that softly veils the sun.'' 

And here is the conclusion of this galloping, 
rollicking, romantic, and sympathetic poem which 
ends on Raleigh — 

" Yet did they sail the seas, 
And, dazed with exceeding wonder, 
Straight thro' the sunset-glory 
Plunge into the dawn : 
Leaving their home behind them, 
By a road of splendour and thunder, 
They came to their home in amazement 
Simply by sailing on." 

This Ambassador for Poetry divides his time 
between England and America. In 191 3 he gave 
the Lowell Lectures in America on the " Sea in 
English Poetry." In 191 4 he was elected to the 



234 More Authors and I 

Professorship of Modern English Literature at 
Princeton University. Enthusiasm, a real love for 
making verse, and teaching people how to speak it, 
keeps him at white heat, and there is also the 
pleasant reflection that he has sold 100,000 copies 
of the " Collected Edition " of his poems. Poets 
need such encouragement. 

His latest poem is his best — The Torch Bearers, 
the first volume of a trilogy, which is planned as an 
Epic of Science. 



XL. BARRY PAIN 

OF all the writers that I have known Barry Pain is 
one of the few who is as humorous in private 
life as in his books. His humour is not 
invented ; he has no recipe for it ; it bubbles out 
from contact with his environment, whether it be 
at a luncheon table, a public meeting, or a casual 
encounter. Being a humorist he is also a serious 
man with a philosophical bent. Humour is often 
but the foam that plays along the waves, urged to 
frolic from deep undersea currents. He is also a 
poet. One of the best of the war poems was written 
by him and published in The Times of London in 
1914. 

Whenever I meet this large-limbed, bearded, 
kindly man, he has cronies with him, who listen, 
with appreciative delight, to his ready humour. I 
delight in it. Others may not think it funny, but 
what is humour ? Here is an example of Barry 
Pain's unpremeditated comment. 

At a certain club a group of friends were wont to 
meet for luncheon. Barry Pain was usually there. 
Parenthetically I may remark that he is rather an 
adept at culinary affairs and a connoisseur of the 
byways of meals. He has strong views about salads. 
One day, at the height of summer, a water-colour 
painter came rather late to the luncheon table. He 
asked the steward what the dish of the day might 

235 



236 More Authors and I 

be. The steward replied, " Cold beef and salad," 
and lie added, " Will you make your own salad, 
sir ? " " Yes," replied the water-colour painter, 
thinking about something more important than 
salads. Barry Pain was watching him, with that 
slow, amused estimating look on his face that is its 
chronic aspect. The water-colour painter took a 
tablespoon and poured into it absent-mindedly one 
after the other the contents of the cruets. These 
he threw carelessly upon the green-stuff; still 
absent-mindedly he looked round the table for 
something else ; he added mustard and salt, paused, 
and seeing that he had not yet taken any red pepper, 
added a pinch of that ; then still absent-mindedly 
he glanced around the table for something else. 
Barry Pain, who had been watching him with delight 
throughout the operation, here said, " Now put 
your boots in." 

He commenced to write early, and his first efforts 
showed that peculiar mixture of humour and fantasy, 
with suggestions of " something more," a kind of 
rarefied sentiment, that informs all his books. 
Classical scholar of Corpus Christi College, Cam- 
bridge, he made his initial success on the Granta, 
the university magazine, at Cambridge. His first 
publication, when he came to London, was called In 
a Canadian Canoe , published in 1891. No doubt 
many of these sketches and stories had done duty in 
the Granta. The book was not a great popular 
success, but it made his name. It was a new note. 
I loved it, and for some time had to check my- 
self from trying to write in the manner of the 
sketches and stories in In a Canadian Canoe. They 



Barry Pain 237 

were so fresh, so fanciful, so lively, so humorous, 
with a curious and unexpected pathos under them 
all. In spite of the numerous books, many of 
them in a light vein, some more serious, that 
he has published since, I should choose In a 
Canadian Canoe as the fullest expression of his 
original talent. 

This volume, which was followed by Playthings 
and Parodies, and Stories and Interludes in 1892, 
gave him the entree into London literary journalism. 
He was on the staff of the Speaker and the National 
Observer, and he and J. M. Barrie were among 
the few young men on that distinguished journal 
who were allowed by W. E. Henley to write just in 
the way that they wanted to write. 

When Jerome K. Jerome started To-day and The 
Idler, Barry Pain was one of the group of writers on 
those journals who were labelled " New Humor- 
ists." His was a genial humour ; it had nothing of 
the metallic quality of George Ade or Irvin Cobb 
in it. It was mellow, and it was often derived 
from acute observation of London types, such as 
cabmen, waiters, charwomen. His story called 
" The Charwoman," grim and relentless, yet full of 
feeling, made quite a sensation when it was published 
in the Christmas number of the Pall Mall Budget. 
It was said that the man who could write that 
should be able to write almost anything. It is one 
of Barry Pain's oddities that he seems to be always 
on the eve of writing a great book, and fills in his 
time producing little books, amusing and suggestive, 
but not great. 

He is an easy parodist. He took to it early. 



238 More Authors and I 

Playthings and Parodies was one of his first attempts. 
It was he who, when Richard le Gallienne published 
the Religion of a Literary Man, countered with the 
Religion of a Cab Driver. He also parodied Laurence 
Housman's An Englishwoman's Love Letters with 
Another Englishwoman's Love Letters. His parody 
of Mrs. Asquith's Reminiscences under the title 
Marge Askinforit, is remembered with delight by 
many readers. 

Sometimes he produces a fairly serious volume, 
such as The Octave of Claudius and Lindley Kays. 
His latest work at the time of writing is Going 
Home, a typical example of the mature Barry Pain — 
a mixture of realism and fantasy, blended very skil- 
fully. One of the characters is a young man, with 
wings, who flies by night, and occasionally rests on 
the dome of St. Paul's, and a girl whose longing 
" was always to return, to go back again, like a 
child that is homesick. It would come suddenly to 
her, without the spur of beauty to provoke it, when 
she was doing some quite ordinary and commonplace 
thing. That very morning it came to her as she 
tied her shoes. Tears had filled her eyes, and she 
had found herself saying aloud, ' Oh, to be there 
again ! ' There ? Where ? She did not know. 
But from time to time a memory of its peace, deep 
and warm, seemed to reach her." 

This curious, short and touching Going Home has 
a beautiful passage in it, which does not permit 
itself to be forgotten. The passage is this : "So I 
shall see the story you make out of it," says the 
artist. To which the girl replies, "If it turns out 
to be a story. I don't know yet what it will be, I 



Barry Pain 239 

want to know the real things — and then make them 
lovelier." 

Whether Barry Pain writes the great book or not, 
this can be said of him, that he wants to know the 
real things, and to make them lovelier. 



XLI. COVENTRY PATMORE 

ONE of the most vital, lively, and characteristic 
portraits that John S. Sargent ever painted 
is that of Coventry Patmore. It hangs in 
the National Portrait Gallery, flanked by Henry 
James and Matthew Arnold, and underneath it are 
these words : " Poet. Author of The Angel in the 
House, The Unknown Eros ; Rod, Root and Flower, 
etc." Painted in 1894 by John S. Sargent. Pre- 
sented February, 1897. 

In my opinion Coventry Patmore is the hand- 
somest poet in this collection of eminent nineteenth- 
century writers. I admit that some people would 
not agree with me, but there is an air of distinction 
and aristocratic alertness about this portrait that 
singles it out from all the others. The National 
Portrait Gallery is a very popular place, and I often 
wonder how many of the crowd who gaze at the 
Patmore portrait have ever read The Angel in the 
House or his volume of Odes, called The Unknown 
Eros, or Rod, Root and Flower, Patmore is not a 
popular poet. For one person who reads him, 
probably a hundred read Tennyson, but he is in 
all the Victorian Anthologies, and almost all quote 
the same things : " Departure," " The Toys," " A 
Farewell." I know them by heart. This is from 
" Departure "— 

240 



Coventry Patmore 241 

'" And it was like your great and gracious ways 
To turn your talk on daily things, my Dear, 
Lifting the luminous, pathetic lash 
To let the laughter flash, 
Whilst I drew near. 
Because you spoke so low that I could scarcely hear." 

Here is a quatrain called " Courtesy " — 

" Love's perfect blossom only blows 
Where noble manners veil defect. 
Angels may be familiar ; those 

Who err, each other must respect." 

Years ago I met Coventry Patmore at a house in 
London one Sunday afternoon, and was confirmed 
in my opinion that great mystical poets are not 
jolly companions, and do not come into the " Hail, 
fellow, well met " category. We were seated in 
the drawing-room, one winter afternoon. The coal 
fire had been allowed to dwindle, as our hostess had 
been talking in her quiet, aloof way of Shelley, and 
when she talked we were unconscious of material 
matters. While our thoughts were at their tensest, 
Mr. Coventry Patmore was announced, and the tall, 
detached, withdrawn-from-the-world figure stalked 
into the room. He greeted our hostess with old- 
world dignity and reserve ; then he seated himself 
in a high-backed, rather uncomfortable chair and 
was silent. Suddenly he arose, and said to our 
hostess, " If you will permit me, I will go downstairs 
and put on my topcoat." Presently he returned, 
buttoned up and brooding. He resumed his seat 
but did not utter another word. After he had 
departed, I said to my hostess, Mrs. Meynell, " I 



242 More Authors and I 

believe the Poet was cold," and the regret and grief 
that she put into her ejaculation, " Oh ! " has 
remained with me to this day. 

Coventry Patmore has five lines in the " Proper 
Names Volume " of the Century Dictionary — " Born 
at Woodford, Essex. An English poet and writer. 
He was assistant librarian at the British Museum 
1847 to 1868. He published Poems 1844; Jammer- 
ton Church Tower, etc., 1853 ; The Angel in the 
House, in four parts, 1854-62, etc." 

Among the etc. are two small volumes, Principle 
in Art, and Religio Poetce. I find them companion- 
able and stimulating : they have been my bedside 
companions for years. All of these essays appeared 
in journals and magazines, such as the Fortnightly 
Review and the St. James's Gazette. In amiable 
mood Patmore was apt to call himself a Journalist 
in the way that Herbert Spencer might have called 
himself a Billiard Player, or Mr. Lloyd George a 
Hymn Singer. His essays are sometimes truculent : 
they have over-emphasis and over-statements, but 
they are always the expression of a sincere and 
beautiful character, not quite at home in the material 
progress of the Victorian era. One of the most 
curious and characteristic of his essays is that called 
" Dieu et Ma Dame," which ends thus : " We must 
usually feed for many ye^rs upon divine things before 
God gives us the taste of our food ; and even when 
we have done all, we may not find ourselves among 
the blessed number of those who are called to the 
Counsels of Perfection and the fruition of God in 
this life." 

Another of my favourites among his volumes is a 



Coventry Patmore 243 

small pamphlet, now out of print, containing essays 
on that attractive, peaceful, and leisurely section of 
Sussex, of which Winchelsea and Rye are the land- 
marks. Once he owned a house in the " Antient 
Towne of Winchelsea," and I hold that the articles 
he wrote on that historic and beautiful district arc 
among his most sympathetic and delicately observed 
work. In 1900 Basil Champneys published a volume 
called Coventry Patmore : Memoirs and Correspond- 
ence, and Osbert Berdet has recently issued The 
Idea of Coventry Patmore — " an intellectual rather 
than an emotional apprehension of the Patmore 
idea." 

He has lately again stalked silently before the 
public, through the volume called Courage in Politics 
and Other Essays, 1885 to 1896, which have been 
collected by Mr. F. Page. An Appendix contains a 
Bibliographical List of Coventry Patmore's Prose 
Contribution to Periodical Literature, chiefly to 
the St. James's Gazette, between 1845 and 1896. 

In the volume Courage in Politics is included 
Patmore's Essay on " Francis Thompson : A New 
Poet," from the Fortnightly Review of January, 1894, 
and Mrs. MeynelPs " New Essays," which appeared 
in the Saturday Review of June, 1896. 

Francis Thompson was devoted to Patmore. He 
found in him a Guide, Philosopher and Friend. 

Here is a passage from Patmore's Essay on Francis 
Thompson — 

" I feel a personal and sort of proprietary interest 
in the metrical qualities of much of Mr. Thompson's 
verse. Between the years 1867 and 1877 I was 
mainly engaged in endeavouring to draw attention 



244 More Authors and I 

to the capacities of the iambic tetrameter with 
unlimited catalexis, which is commonly called the 
' irregular ' ode, though it is really as ' regular ' as 
any other English metre, and even much more so, if 
its subtle laws are truly considered and obeyed. 5 ' 

When Patmore admired, he admired with all his 
heart. Here is the opening of his article on Mrs. 
Meynell's " New Essays "— 

" Since the publication of Sir Thomas Browne's 
Religio Medici, two hundred and fifty years ago, 
probably no literary work of equal quality has ever 
met with recognition so sudden and complete as 
that which has been accorded to the Essays of 
Mrs. Meynell." 

And here, at the conclusion of the article, is a 
characteristic specimen of Patmorean praise. He 
singles out for special commendation two of Mrs. 
Meynell's essays, that on " Eleonora Duse " and 
that on " Japanese Art." After giving the highest 
praise to the essay on " Duse," he continues — 

" I must simply stake whatever character I may 
have for critical discernment on my unsupported 
assertion that the other essay, called ' Symmetry 
and Incident,' rises far above that ' high-water mark ' 
and that we must go back to Goethe, Lessing, and 
Hegel if we would discover any piece of criticism so 
novel, of such far-reaching importance, so moderate, 
so simple, so conclusive — in a word, so great." 

Appendix I. is a reprint of the letter Coventry 
Patmore wrote to the Saturday Review in October, 
1875, strongly recommending Mrs. Meynell for the 
office of Poet Laureate. 

There is another book, A Catalogue of the Library 



Coventry Patmore 245 

of Coventry Patmore. It was purchased in 1921 by 
Everard Meynell, and from this alone I could make 
an entire intimate article on Coventry Patmore. It 
contains a reproduction of the portrait by Sargent, 
and an exquisite " Introductory Note " by Mrs. 
Meynell, which begins — 

" Coventry Patmore was hardly, in the usual sense, 
a man of letters, still less a literary man, because — 
loving poetry passionately, as he did — he passed 
through and beyond letters, beyond the letter of 
any poem that he approved. You did not hear 
him quote this or that beautiful phrase for its beauty ; 
he cited it because it was true, because it bore 
witness, or seemed to him to bear witness, to a 
truth he had at heart. . . . Patmore corrected dili- 
gently, because, like other great poets, he had to 
wait for the true word. When the true word 
came there was no more question, it was the living 
word." 

Did space permit I could quote endlessly from this 
Catalogue, which contains comments and criticism 
by Patmore written in many of his books, together 
with letters he received from author friends. But 
I must find room for Francis Thompson's description 
of Patmore in his " Victorian Ode " — 

" Last came a shadow tall, with drooping lid, 
Which yet not hid 

The steel-like flashing of his armed glance ; . . . 
It seemed as in that quire 
He had not, nor desired, any brother . . . 

Then at a touch 
He turned the heel and sought with shadowy stride 
His station in the dim 
Where the sole-thoughted Dante waited him." 



246 More Authors and I 

And here is an extract from a letter from Francis 
Thompson to Patmore — 

" You are the only man with whom I can talk at 
all. With all others it is a matter of playing an 
intermittent chord or so, as an accompaniment to 
their talk. . . . Yours is the conversation of a man 
who has trodden before me the way which for years 
I trod alone, and often desperate, seeing no guiding 
parallel among modern poets to my aims and 
experience." 

Edmund Gosse has said of Coventry Patmore 
that he spent a long life mainly in the contemplation 
of Literature and of Eternity, but in such imperfect 
relation to other human beings that he grew to 
speak a language which to the majority of mankind 
was almost unintelligible. 

True. But at his best he showed a shining sim- 
plicity, as in " Departure," " A Farewell," " The 
Toys," and in certain unforgettable passages of his 
essays. 

There is a passage in Mrs. MeynelPs essay on 
Coventry Patmore that might stand for his whole 
biography : " He valued his country chiefly for her 
poets." 



XLII. G. W. RUSSELL (A. E.) 

AE. is George William Russell — poet, artist, 
# editor, agriculturist, economist, essayist, 
dreamer. He is an Irish Protestant, an 
Ulsterman, and a Publicist ; and one of the most 
beloved, and the most appreciated of Irishmen. 

I asked three people what the letters A. E. signify. 
Mr. Nevinson suggested that they came by chance. 
" Call me A. E. or anything else you like," said 
George W. Russell to some editor who wanted a 
signature for an anonymous article. 

Mr. Smiles maintained, with a smile, that A. E. 
stands for Agricultural Economist. 

Then I asked myself ; and knowing something of 
A. E.'s enthusiasm for an Irish rural civilization to 
be realized by agricultural co-operation, I answered, 
" A. E. means Agricultural Enthusiast." 

Presently I eased my pen and murmured, " Why 
did you not ask him during that delightful afternoon 
you spent in his Dublin office in 1910 ? " 

Those were the brave days when Sir Hugh Lane 
was rushing hither and thither in a fine fury of art 
activity gathering in pictures for the Dublin 
Municipal Gallery. The collection was almost 
complete : it was contained in a fine old Dublin 
house, and dear Lane, the most alert and the most 
intuitional art connoisseur of the day, was still 
hoping that the Dublin Corporation would build 

HI 



248 More Authors and I 

him a proper Gallery for the treasures that he had 
given to the City. " Come over with me to- 
morrow, and see how they look in their temporary 
home," he said to me one evening. " Come, and 
we'll visit A. E. and his pictures." 

So to Dublin we went. We spent the morning 
in the Municipal Art Gallery — such pictures, a 
connoisseur's choice of essential and vital works ; 
and in the afternoon we visited Plunkett House in 
Merrion Square, where A. E. has his office, and 
where he edits The Irish Homestead (I hope it is 
published still) and plans and runs the co-operative 
system with his " comrade, Sir Horace Plunkett," 
for the betterment of the Irish peasant farmer. 

I have never seen such an office. I have never 
seen such an editor. The walls of the office are 
decorated with pictures by A. E.'s own hand, 
dreams of nature and Celtic mythology, vast 
frescoes, rather overpowering, rather obscure to 
me, for, in spite of the tuition of my Irish friends, I 
have never been able to grow enthusiastic about 
Deirdre, Usheen and other shadows " in the many- 
coloured land of Druid twilights and tunes." 

But these shadows are all very real to A. E., as 
real as co-operative farming. Perhaps one of these 
pictures was the twilight he painted " from love 
of some colours and harmonious lines " which he 
refers to in his beautiful essay called " Art and 
Literature." 

And the man himself, the big, shaggy, loosely 
built, roughly dressed Editor-Poet, with grey-blue 
eyes and a soft voice, how he talked — -about Ireland, 
and poetry, and mysticism, and farming, and Yeats, 



G. W. Russell {A. E.) 249 

and Lady Gregory, and James Stephens, and Sewmas 
O'Sullivan who wrote the line — " And hidden 
rivers were murmuring in the dark," and so won 
the heart of A. E. 

And I, through a flash of memory, was able to 
touch the heart of A. E. that afternoon. If you 
want to win a poet at the first meeting quote some- 
thing that he has written, say it outright to his face : 
he will blanch, but he will be very pleased. The 
stanza I quoted was this — 

" In the wet dusk silver sweet, 
Down the violet-scented ways, 
As I moved with quiet feet 
I was met by mighty days." 

It is from a poem called " The Memory of Earth." 
I had read it one day in Cornwall, and it had 
remained. 

A. E.'s Collected Poems were issued in 191 3, with 
additions in 191 9. I have just been reading the 
comely volume, and although it hurts me to say 
it, I have to own that I do not think A. E. is a great 
poet. He has gifts and accomplishments ; he is 
sensitive and he has taste ; he is a lover of beauty ; 
a lover of mankind, he is one of those who walk with 
God ; but he lacks that something essential, the 
human lyrical cry that Keats had, that Yeats in 
lesser degree has. 

He is an accomplished poet, very accomplished, and 
very sincere, but not great. There are, of course, 
lovely things in his poems such as " Reconcilia- 
tion," " I begin through the grass once again to be 
bound to the Lord," and the poem called " On 



250 More Authors and I 

Behalf of Some Irishmen Not Followers of Tradi- 
tion " ; but I feel that he writes poetry because he 
likes to produce poetry, not because he must produce 
poetry. 

He is a subtle and sensitive essayist. Like all 
accomplished poets he writes beautiful prose, and 
he seems to be able to say things in prose, direct 
and thought-stirring, that he is not able to commu- 
nicate through the vehicle of verse. In one of his 
essays he has been speaking of the way art uncon- 
sciously reaches out to archetypes, lifting itself up 
to walk in the garden of truth. He ends the 
paragraph thus — 

" A man may sit in an arm-chair and travel farther 
than ever Columbus travelled ; and no one can say 
how far Turner, in his search after light, had not 
journeyed into the lost Eden, and he himself may 
have been there most surely at the last when his 
pictures had become a blaze of incoherent light." 

Curiously A. E. expresses himself best in the 
Prefaces to his volumes. This is not strange, 
because when a man has finished a book, if he be the 
right kind of author, he says to himself, " Now I am 
ready to write on that subject," and in his Prefaces 
A. E. explains his attitude in writing the book, and, 
as it were, sums up what he had to say in the book. 
Thus in the Preface to Imaginations and Reveries, a 
book of essays, he says — 

" Birth in Ireland gave me a bias to Irish national- 
ism, while the spirit which inhabits my body told 
me the politics of eternity ought to be my only 
concern, and that all other races equally with my 
own were children of the Great King." 



G. W. Russell {A, E.) 251 

Do you not love a man who can write like that ? 

Would that A. E. had kept always on that high 
plane. But recent events in Ireland urged him to 
write a contentious and bitter pamphlet on 77 • 
Economics of Ireland and the Policy of the British 
Government. It has an introduction by Francis 
Hackett (sic). I don't quite know what sic means, 
but I mean it to mean that when Mr. Francis 
Hackett writes on politics he always says something 
that I don't like, and that doesn't heal. I have 
stuck this pamphlet away on my Useless Shelf. It 
doesn't go with A. E.'s other writings. I want from 
him the Inner Memory and the Vision Beautiful : 
not things like his angry, open letter to Rudyard 
Kipling, but such things as : 

" We would no Irish sign efface, 

But yet our lips would gladlier hail 
The firstborn of the Coming Race 
Than the last splendour of the Gael." 

And I will give myself the pleasure of copying out 
A. E.'s Preface to The Candle of Vision, another 
volume of his essays. It says all. 

" When I am in my room looking upon the walls 
I have painted I see there reflections of the personal 
life, but when I look through the windows I see a 
living nature and landscapes not painted by hands. 
So, too, when I meditate I feel in the images and 
thoughts which throng about me the reflections of 
personality, but there are also windows in the soul 
through which can be seen images created not by 
human but by the divine imagination. I have 
tried according to my capacity to report about the 



252 More Authors and I 

divine order and to discriminate between that which 
was self-begotten fantasy and that which came 
from a higher sphere. These retrospects and medi- 
tations are the efforts of an artist and poet to relate 
his own vision to the vision of the seers and writers 
of sacred books, and to discover what element of 
truth lay in those imaginations." 

It is such writing as this, combined with his 
devotion to the betterment of the Irish people, that 
has made this poet-artist, A.E., one of the most 
beloved and the most appreciated of Irishmen. 



XLIII. CLEMENT SCOTT 

THE idea that Clement Scott stood for in the 
pages of The Daily Telegraph through the 
eighties and nineties in London, is the idea 
that William Ernest Henley, in the pages of The 
National Observer, scorned. Each was a fighter. 
They did not light each other ; they fought each 
other's ideas. I doubt if they ever met ; but re- 
flecting on those ardent years in the eighties and 
nineties in London, these two men stand out as 
captains. I am a Henley man ; he has my affec- 
tion, loyalty, and admiration, yet here I am writing 
of Clement Scott. Ah, the years soften and 
simplify, and prejudices vanish in the will to be 
just. 

As a man of letters, Clement Scott does not enter 
into any kind of competition with Henley. As a 
poet Henley is in the anthologies, as a writer he 
ranks among the best. He was a force : so was 
Clement Scott. But Clement Scott was merely a 
sound, all-round man of letters, with a pretty 
faculty for writing sentimental and patriotic verse. 
He was also the dramatic critic of The Daily Tele- 
graph. Therein was his force, his power. He made 
that position one of extraordinary influence. No 
other dramatic critic has ever wielded the power of 
Clement Scott. Papa Sarcey in the Figaro was a 
finer and more fastidious writer, Jules Lemaitre 

253 



254 More Authors and I 

was an intellectual wit delightful to the intelli- 
gentsia ; William Winter was a power ; A. B. 
WalMey in The Times, of London, is a joy, but I 
read his dramatic articles to enjoy him — the play 
doesn't matter. Yet none of these caught the 
big public, as big-hearted, exuberant, sentimental 
Clement Scott did. The man in the street, also 
the average sensual man, who loves to be chastised 
into repentance over his breakfast, adored Clemmy. 
How Clemmy would have slated and hated Somerset 
Maugham's Too Many Husbands, and how the average 
sensual man would have agreed with Clemmy, after 
he had enjoyed the play. 

Clement Scott joined the staff of The Daily 
Telegraph in 1 872. A " round of suppers " signalized 
his silver jubilee in 1897. Later came trouble owing 
to misunderstanding about an article he had written. 
1 thought then, I think now, it was merely a mis- 
understanding. It resulted in his resignation. He 
then visited America, wrote for the New York 
Herald, and " impressed the people with the serious 
tone he adopted about the theatre." This quota- 
tion is from a delightful book by Mrs. Clement Scott 
called Old Days in Bohemian London. 

First, to understand the power that Clement 
Scott wielded, it may be well to glance at the 
condition of London journalism in the eighties and 
nineties. I do it from memory, not from documents. 
Journalism went soberly in the eighties. American 
methods, as we were pleased to call them, had not 
been adopted. The interview was unknown, or so 
timid that it looked like a dignified article. The 
word dignified was popular : personal references 






Clement Scott 255 

were uncommon because they were not genteel : the 
" we " ruled the columns : the word gossip was 
never mentioned. I remember my father's frown 
when Moy Thomas instituted in The Daily News a 
Monday morning theatrical news and comment 
column. It was written in Blue-Book English : 
it was full of laborious statements. " Vulgar," said 
my father ; " who wants to know what these 
people are doing ? " 

The backbone of each daily paper was the editorial 
page with its columns of leading articles. The 
successful leader-writers were those who could 
employ ten high-sounding words to state something 
which could be explained in two, but a few men of 
humour and imagination disregarded this fetish of 
wordiness, and were allowed to be themselves. 
Andrew Lang was one of them. I took The Daily 
Neivs because Andrew Lang wrote for it. His 
leaders were not signed, but you could pick them 
out as you find your sweetheart's face in a crowd. 
I always bought The Daily Telegraph after an 
important first night. Thousands did likewise. 
" What does Clemmy say ? " was the current question 
of the morning among my friends who were in- 
terested in the theatre. We called him Clem or 
Clemmy, as we called Mr. Gladstone the G. O. M., 
Mr. Joseph Chamberlain — Jo, and Mr. Labouchere 
— Labby. I was unacquainted with actors and 
actresses in those days, but knew that " the profes- 
sion," as for some reason or another it was termed, was 
always much concerned as to what Clement Scott 
would say. Mrs. Scott tells us that Charles Hawtrey 
and many others would sit up all night to get the 



256 More Authors and I 

early edition of The Daily Telegraph to see what 
Clement Scott had said about their new play. 

The Daily Telegraph was unique — unbelievably- 
unique. It is a great newspaper to-day, because 
it has gone very cleverly with the times. The 
young lions no longer roar vociferously ; they have 
been tamed and brought up to date, but they still 
need a good deal of space for their rhetoric. The 
wise and clever proprietors still allow their best lions 
unlimited space. The lions have won this freedom. 
Once when Mr. le Sage, the editor, sent a messenger 
to Clement Scott, asking him to curtail his article as 
there was a great press of news, Scott replied : 
" Give my compliments to Mr. le Sage and tell him 
to go to hell. Tell him I shall write as much as I 
like." 

George August Sala was still a power on The 
Daily Telegraph when Clement Scott was rising 
into fame. The paper was written, proudly, in 
Telegraphese. It was said by rivals that over each 
fireplace these words were inscribed : " Ordinary 
papers call a spade a spade. We call it an agricul- 
tural implement." 

Clement Scott asserted himself early. Once Mr. 
J. M. Levy, one of the first proprietors, reprimanded 
Clement Scott for writing " effusive gush " about 
an unknown actor and his play. The actor was 
Henry Irving, the play was The Bells. " After 
that," says the chronicler, " Mr. Levy gave him 
his head." I must again quote Mrs. Scott : " No- 
body dreamed of speaking to C. S. when he reached 
The Daily Telegraph office after a first night to pour 
out a boiling column. He'd throw off his Inverness, 



Clement Scott 257 

then liis coat — his gibus had already been disposed 
of — and, rolling up his shirt-sh if preparing 

for a fight, he started.' 1 The boiling column (or 
columns) that resulted was merely " effusive stuff v 
to Henley and the National Observer young men. 
Ii they ever read it the}' laughed, but The Daily 
'Telegraph readers adored it. 

Those readers were the great middle class of 
England, sane, sentimental, and entirely inartistic, 
who in music liked oratorios and " The Lost Chord," 
in art Sir Frederick Leighton and Alma-Tadema, 
and in drama, East Lynne and The Silver King. 
When Clement Scott told them that Ibsen was 
obscene they believed him, shouted, and would 
probably have stoned the creator of the modern 
drama had he walked down Clapham High Street. 
Clement Scott's favourite word was wholesome. 
Problem plays were unwholesome, so he stormed at 
them. He hated The Second Mrs. Tanqueray ; he 
loathed Brieux ; in heated periods, boiling with 
adjectives, he thundered for " pleasure houses for 
the people to enjoy good, wholesome, human plays, 
and fine, stirring dramas. " 

Meanwhile the world went on. More and more 
people found in Ibsen an awakener, an uncoverer of 
platitudes masking under the name of virtues, a 
stimulus toward clearer thought and a cleaner heart. 
And more and more Clement Scott shouted against 
what he called the " Drama of the Dustbin." He 
was fearless and frank — that was why those, who did 
not agree with him, liked Clemmy. He poured out- 
columns of belligerent rhetoric in the columns of 
The Daily Telegraph and the proprietors freely gave 



258 More Authors and I 

him his head, for he increased the sale of the paper, 
he made the dramatic columns famous, and if what 
he wrote was narrow, it was at any rate virile and 
virtuous. " Give me pleasure houses for the 
people," he reiterated, " give me pleasure houses 
for the people to enjoy good, wholesome, human 
plays, and fine, stirring dramas." He always 
shouted, and Mrs. Clement Scott, who is everything 
that a loyal, biographer-widow should be, remarks 
naively on page 165 : " Clement Scott usually got 
the worst of the argument because he shouted." 

Oh, how the pitites and galleryites applauded 
when Clement Scott entered the stalls on a first 
night. He always came early : he took his duties 
seriously. Surely never before in the history of the 
theatre had a dramatic critic received an ovation. 
It did not matter then whether he was right or 
wrong; we cheered him because he had made a 
great figure for himself in the literary and dramatic 
world, and because he had pushed the drama up 
into prominence and something like glory. 

He played his part gallantly. He did not shrink 
into the stalls, like some critics, in his working 
clothes and a soft collar. He came in like a king, 
with swelling shirt-front and a flower in his button- 
hole. Solomon, in all his glory, would have 
approved. 

But the public, though generous, is fickle. There 
came a day when his entry was greeted with Boo- 
Boo-Boo — horrid sound ! This honest man — he 
was as honest as John Morley or John Burns— had 
somehow offended the " Gallery First-Nighters 
Club," the " Pitites," and the " Playgoers." Was 



Clement Scott 259 

it because he had slated a popular favourite, H. V. 
Esmond, in an article beginning, " Vaulting am- 
bition ! Vaulting ambition ! " Boo-Boo-Boo — 
horrid sound ! At any rate after that Clement Scott 
was always given a box (managers dislike disturbance) 
in which he hid like a wounded lion in a cave. But 
we were artful. We would wait until we perceived 
Mrs. Scott's charming coiffure (Eve was curious, too) 
hesitating behind the muslin curtains. Then 
" Good old Clemmy, stick it," or " Boo-Boo-Boo," 
according to our disposition. A London theatrical 
audience was, and is, very much alive and eager. 
Sometimes I wish American audiences were not so 
shy. Fancy the dramatic critic of the Toledo 
Blade being greeted with cheers or boos as he takes 
his seat in the orchestra stalls. 

So Clement Scott passes and remains. I honour 
him for his honesty. But freedom is a bigger thing 
than a view-point. If Clemmy had had his way I 
should have been debarred from the stimulation and 
education of Ibsen, Tchekov, Brieux, Gorki, Shaw, 
Galsworthy, and others. I should have been con- 
demned to sit out the intolerable inanities of The 
Sign of the Cross ; and should have lost the immeasur- 
able self-questioning aroused by The Second Mrs. 
Tanqueray and Mrs. Warren's Profession. 



XLIV. SIR OWEN SEAMAN 

ON the title-page of Borrowed Plumes by Sir 
Owen Seaman, which I obtained from my 
favourite New York Branch Public Library, I 
found this written in pencil : " Wit and humour." 

Obviously these words are intended to classify 
the book, which is a collection of prose parodies of 
eminent authors, and obviously the words were 
pencilled on the title-page by some careful librarian 
to describe the volume. Were I one of those 
nefarious persons who mark books belonging to the 
public, I should cross out the words " Wit and 
humour," and write in their place " More wit than 
humour," or perhaps merely " Wit." 

For Sir Owen Seaman, Kt., cr. 1914; M.A. ; 
D.Litt. ; ex-Lieut. 2nd Batt. County of London 
Volunteer Regiment, and Editor of Punch, is a 
Wit — neat, natty and caustic ; but I do not detect 
in any of his writings signs of humour. Certainly 
he is not humorous in conversation (that is to say, 
not with me). I have never heard humour bubble 
from his lips as it does from the lips of Barry Pain, 
Jerome, and Pett Ridge ; but he is certainly a witty 
person in print, a little hard and metallic, but his 
wit is always to the point, and sometimes it is barbed. 
Would you like a taste of it before we go farther ? 
Here are the first two stanzas of " Oral Questions and 
Written Answers " from the volume called Salvage. 

260 



Sir Oicen Seaman 261 

I uti tlif BOuffll and tl • 

\\ h< d tall 
Like littl< ice- 

\\ hose pattei hardly counts at all — 
asked me, as a I aely pitied 

(Noting the ••' \*% gown) 

\\ bethel it borcci . the world had flitted, 

To stay behind in Town ! 

I answered DIM 

My many candid friends agree 
That it has never been my wont 

To shine in oral repartee ; 
But only give me time and works of reference, 

Those mental aids which Parliament permits, 
And I can be a match, with all due deference, 

For ministerial wits." 

That is witty and neat, but it has no humour, for 
humour means sympathy, and imagine the feelings 
of a debutante, or a young matron, immensely proud 
to meet the great Editor of Punch, and immensely 
shy, cudgelling her feather brains for something to 
say, and then popping out that silly question : 
imagine her feelings when the Editor of Punch 
flashes at her " No, it don't." Sir Frank Burnand, 
a former Editor of Punch, and a humorist, would 
never have answered like that, even when he was 
bored and snappy. 

I may be quite wrong in my diagnosis. In the 
family circle Sir Owen may be a delightful humorist : 
at the weekly Wednesday Punch dinners he may 
regularly set the table in a roar. Of this I cannot 
speak, but when I recall the few occasions of our 
meeting, when naturally I gave him openings for 
humorous comment, or witty repartee, he did not 



262 More Authors and I 

rise. One was on the deck of a Channel steamer 
on a rainy, rough day. I was huddled in a shelter, 
and my companion, a seafaring man, who was enjoy- 
ing the discomfort, suddenly paused in his brisk walk 
up and down the deck, and said to me, " The 
Editor of Punch is in the next shelter.'' At that I 
stirred and said to myself, " The Editor of Punch 
can cheer me, if anyone can." So I crept round to 
the adjoining shelter and cried gaily, " Halloa." 
The Editor of Punch lifted his head from the moist 
rug, and said, " Horrid, isn't it ? " 

The second occasion was at a private view of the 
Royal Academy. An eddy of the crowd drew us for 
a moment together, and I, acting up to my favourite 
motto, which is, " Say it with flowers," remarked, 
" Punch gets better and better each week." To 
which he replied, " Tell me something new." 

The third occasion was a public dinner of the 
Agenda Club with Sir Owen Seaman in the chair. 
The Agenda Club, I may remark, was an excellent 
society which was started " to get things done." 
It had no politics, and no axes to grind : it was an 
assembly of men of good intent, the foes of slackness 
and inefficiency, and Sir Owen Seaman, being such 
a man, presided. When I made my brief speech, 
being in what Artemus Ward called " a sirkastic and 
witherin' " mood, I chaffed mildly the Agenda Club, 
the secretary and the chairman, for talking a little 
too much about what they were going to do. When 
I sat down I glanced at the Editor of Punch, thinking 
that so witty a man would thoroughly approve of 
my " sirkastic stile," to quote Artemus Ward 
again. Alas, the Editor of Punch did not appreciate 



Sir Owen Seaman 263 

my humour. He glowered at mc ; he looked almost 
angry. 

Well, we cannot expect a man to be witty under 
all conditions, and it is easy to recover our admiration 
for the wit, quick understanding and dexterous 
rhymes of Owen Seaman by turning to the first inside 
page of Punch whereon is printed, always in the 
same place, and with unfailing regularity, the set 
of verses that he has composed on some event or 
foolishness of the week. He is never at a loss, he is 
always alert ; and he has a proper appreciation of 
Calverley. 

" In Calvcrley's delightful pages 

I often chortle at the view 
Expressed by that supreme of sages 

About a certain cockatoo 
Embellished with a regal tuft, 
And suitable for being stuffed." 

Periodically these verses are published in little 
volumes, very pleasant to look through, and none the 
worse because one has sometimes quite forgotten all 
about the subjects of his irony. 

Owen Seaman is also an expert parodist, and for 
those who take pleasure in parody, the collection in 
the volume called Borrowed Plumes is entertaining. 
They are very clever, but I do not think that they 
are as good as Max Beerbohm's Parodies. Those 
who have tried to read Sir John Lubbock will appre- 
citate the following — 

" It is best not to follow two points of the compass 
at the same time. The pilot that steers both for 
Scylla and Charybdis is in danger of missing them 
both (Homer)." 



264 More Authors and I 

Mrs. Meynell herself might smile at the following 
parody of one of her sensitive sentences — 

" Seen in perspective there is symmetry even in 
the suburb, futile else. Peckham has this dominant 
note." 

His earliest success was Horace at Cambridge, 
published in 1894, which originally appeared in the 
pages of the Granta. In the same year he produced 
the Ballad of a Bun, a parody of John Davidson's 
Ballad of a Nun. This delighted London : even I 
smiled. So successful was it that he proceeded 
to parody other of the Bodley Head poets, William 
Watson, Richard Le Gallienne, etc., and friends of 
Mr. John Lane, the " onlie begetter " of the Bodley 
Head, began to sympathize with him (friends are 
like that) on these stings of parody. Mr. John 
Lane replied by congratulating Owen Seaman on 
his witty poems, and offering to publish them. 
This was done : it is that classic, The Battle of the 
Bays. 

Owen Seaman is a bright and nimble commentator: 
his eyes are always on what others are doing : he 
knows just what he can do, and being a gentleman 
and a scholar he does it without too much offence. 
But how wrong was the American reviewer who, 
in his excitement over Borrowed Plumes, wrote, 
" Why he could not have written all of the works 
of the authors he parodies it is difficult to see." I 
wonder that Owen Seaman has not written a funny 
little poem chaffing that reviewer. 

Here am I writing about Owen Seamen and saying 
hardly anything about Punch. When uncles take 
their small nephews to St. Paul's Cathedral they 



Sir Ozven Seaman 265 

try to remember the tag suggesting that those who 
desire to see a monument to Sir Christopher Wren 
need only look around. So one might say of Sir 
Owen Seaman — " Look at Punch.''' 

How can I praise Punch ? We take it for granted, 
like Bank Holidays and the Bank of England. I 
have discovered that Americans admire Punch and 
that Englishmen admire Life ; and I remember the 
words that once fell from the lips of a Minor Wit. 
He said, after studiously comparing the two journals, 
— " Life needs more punch, and Punch needs more 
life." 

In one of his poems the Editor of Punch makes a 
young lady (he is rather fond of conversing with 
young ladies in print) put his " make-up " under 
the microscope of her intuition. 

k< She had a trick I could not bear : 

She tried (I might have known she would) 

To trace beneath my ribald air 
1 Potentialities for good ' ; 

This was to be her future wifely role, 

Namely, to extricate my lurking soul. 

Under your thinnish coat of comic art 
Crouches a grave, austere and noble heart.'' 

Is she right ? Perhaps she is. 



XLV. HERBERT SPENCER 

DID I ever see Herbert Spencer ? 
I may have. But there is a doubt. Here 
is the problem : — 

In the middle nineties a friend invited me to a 
meeting of a Sociological society in which he was 
interested. " The subject," said he, " is ' The 
Effect Upon Children of Savage Parents.' " I 
demurred, as there were many more interesting 
affairs happening in London that afternoon ; but 
when he added : " Herbert Spencer is coming ; 
that is, he didn't say he wouldn't come," I consented. 
For I had been brought up to revere Thinkers, and 
I was eager to see the man who had been described 
as having " no heart, and totally consumed by his 
extraordinary intellect." 

On the platform were a number of patriarchal 
gentlemen, with very high foreheads, untidy 
whiskers, and old-fashioned clothes. Any of them 
might have been Herbert Spencer. Not one of 
them ever made a remark to his neighbour ; not 
one of them ever betrayed enthusiasm or excitement, 
and those who addressed the meeting talked as if 
they were lecturing a class of inconvenient students. 
When they sat down they rested their immense 
heads on their hands and stared, involved in thought, 
at the back of the Professor in front. I was not 
surprised at all this. I did not resent it. For I 

266 



Herbert Spencer 267 

was brought up to consider Thinkers exclusive, in- 
tense, and indifferent, and I bad never imagined a 
Thinker in any other position than that of profound 
thought. Carefully I examined the Thinkers upon 
the platform, trying to determine which was Herbert 
Spencer. I narrowed the choice down to three, 
then to two ; but I advanced no farther because just 
then something extraordinary happened. 

The proceedings were ending, the venerable 
chairman was summing up the opinions of the various 
speakers on the effect of savage parents upon 
children, all of which opinions, I need hardly say, 
were derived from books, when suddenly a man rose 
at the back of the hall and said, impressively and 
with dignity : " I, too, would speak. I was born 
of savage parents. I will tell you all what it is 
like." 

I turned quickly. We all did. Imagine my 
delight : before us stood, in a reach-me-down suit, 
the hatchet-faced Iroquois of Fenimore Cooper, 
friend and hero of my boyhood, or it may have been 
the Last of the Mohicans, calm and imperturbable 
as ever. 

" Sit down, sir," cried the chairman. " I must 
ask you to resume your seat. You are not in order." 

" But," said Eaglefeather, " I am of savage 
parents born. I tell you about it. What it is like — 
all, all." 

" Please resume your seat, sir. Any person 
desiring to speak at these meetings must submit his 
name beforehand and in writing." 

A woman called out " Shame " ; one of the 
Thinkers cried "Chair! Chair!" But the cry 



268 More Authors and I 

of shame was taken up. Many left the meeting in 
protest. I joined them because the sun was shining, 
and so I am unable to state absolutely that I ever 
saw Herbert Spencer. 

But that episode did not shake my faith in the 
genus Thinker or the Great Man of Victorian 
England. The ink on the perceptions of boyhood 
is indelible, and so the names of Herbert Spencer, 
John Stuart Mill and George Henry Lewes will 
always symbolize for me beings too deeply engaged 
in thought to have time to live. Well do I remem- 
ber my apprehension when my uncle once read 
aloud this question that Herbert Spencer addressed 
to the world in his Autobiography — " Is it really a 
fact that women have better intuitions into character 
than men have ? " 

When Herbert Spencer went to live at Brighton 
(5 Percival Terrace) in 1898, I hastened there in the 
hope of seeing him. My mission was unsuccessful ; 
but I had the good fortune to meet a man who 
assured me that he knew the shopkeeper who sold 
Herbert Spencer the cotton wool which he was 
accustomed, in society, to insert into his ears when 
the conversation did not interest him. Probably 
he used the wool in the many boarding-houses he 
frequented, for I gather from his Autobiography that 
this eminent and extraordinary man never had a real 
home. He lived en pension in various districts in 
London. Once he hired a room at 2 Leinster Place — 
" to serve me as a study, with the option of taking 
an additional room if need be." The servants at 
the boarding-house near by were instructed to tell 
visitors that " I was not at home." 



Herbert Spencer 269 

Oh, and I once met a member of the Athenaeum 
Club who informed me that, on two occasions, he 
had watched Herbert Spencer playing billiards ; 
and he narrated to me the famous Herbert Spencer 
billiard story, which I had already heard nine times 
and had told eleven times. Perhaps you may not 
have heard it. The author of Synthetic Philosophy 
was once badly beaten at his favourite game of 
billiards. Immersed in thought he replaced his 
cue, and then turning to his companion said, " Young 
man, your proficiency at billiards argues, in my 
opinion, a singularly ill-spent period of adolescence." 

Readers of Herbert Spencer's Autobiography are 
aware that he was not without a kind of solemn 
humour ; but he was so self-centred, so crammed 
with intellectual vanity, so curious about himself, 
that he could permit his pen to write such a passage 
as this : " With me any tendency toward facetious- 
ness is the result of temporary elation : either caused 
by pleasurable health-giving change, or, more 
commonly, by meeting old friends. Habitually I 
observed that, on seeing the Lotts after a long 
interval, I was apt to give vent to some witticisms 
during the first hour or two, and then thev became 
rare." 

But the philosopher could see a joke. He 
quotes with approval Huxley's witticism : " Oh, 
you know Spencer's idea of a tragedy is a deduction 
killed by a fact." On another occasion Huxley said 
to him : " Come upstairs ; I want to show you 
something which will delight you — a fact that goes 
slick through a great generalization. " 

I admit that I have not read Synthetic Philosophy 



270 More Authors and I 

or Social Statics, but " you never can tell," because 
whenever I have read Herbert Spencer I have been 
surprised at my interest in him, and gratified to find 
that I could understand a good deal. His essay on 
" Education " was almost a white stone in my reading 
career, his " Facts and Comments " was a cheerful 
companion for a week ; and Hhe Man Versus the 
State, a collection of his essays with critical and 
interpretative comments by nine eminent Americans, 
showed me what a hold (apparently) the Spencerian 
philosophy has upon William Howard Taft, Charles 
W. Eliot, Elihu Root, Henry Cabot Lodge, David 
Jayne Hill, Nicholas Murray Butler, Augustus 
P. Gardner, E. H. Gary and Harlan F. Stone. 

I felt quite out in the cold. 

Still further out in the cold felt I when, on the 
occasion of the Herbert Spencer centenary, I read 
yards and yards of closely reasoned, exhaustive 
articles, amazingly well-informed on the Spencerian 
philosophy. I felt terribly uneducated until I 
reflected that it is the business of editors to know 
exactly, with the aid of their secretaries, the twelve 
men in the continent (sometimes there are less than 
twelve) who are experts on a subject that the accident 
of a date has made a news event. 

While I was reading these learned articles on 
Spencer I wondered what the average American, 
" the man in the street," thinks of him. In the 
course of the next few days I addressed myself on 
the subject to various people. I said to them — 
" If I repeat to you words like Lambs, Fire Engines, 
Ice Cream, The Fourth of July, certain mental 
pictures float into your mind. Now, what kind 



Herbert Spencer 271 

of mental picture have you when I say the word — 
Herbert Spencer ? " 

Here are the replies : — 

A Bookseller — We have some call for First 
Principles — but not much. The Essays on Education 
are published in " Everyman's Library." 

A Governess (to whom I had given a copy of 
Education) — I read a bit, and then I had to comb my 
hair. 

A Painter — When I went to England someone 
told me that he was the greatest philosopher in the 
world. No, I don't read him. 

A Girl Librarian — Oh, yes, I know The Faerie 
Oucene and The Shepherd's Calendar quite well. 

When I reminded her that those were written by 
another Spenser she replied, " Of course, how silly 
of me ! He was in love with George Eliot, wasn't 
he ? " Whereupon I drew her attention to the 
Autobiography, Vol. I. p. 462, where the philosopher 
says : " There were reports that I was in love with 
her, and that we were about to be married. But 
neither of these reports was true." 

A Photographer — I have developed the habit of 
reading a page of him once a week. His clear, 
straightforward style has a strong attraction for 
me. I consider Spencer the greatest analytical 
intelligence of the Anglo-Saxon race. 

An Editor — He said somewhere that the use of 
superlatives argues dishonesty of mind. 

A Hyphenated American — I studied him at Bonn. 
My interest now is entirely in Chinese philosophy. 

A Taxicab Driver — Ask my missis. She's the 
reader. 



272 More Authors and I 

When Herbert Spencer was in his teens he was 
taken by his uncle to an evening party at Bath. 
The hostess inquired why the grave boy was not 
waltzing. To which the uncle replied, " No 
Spencer ever dances." 



XLVI. GEORGE W. STEEVENS 

OUR first meeting, in the autumn of 1893, was 
laconic. He came into my room at the 
Pall Mall Budget office (the old building in 
Northumberland Street), and said, " I'm Steevens." 

His manners were always nice. You see I was an 
editor, but not his editor : he was paying me a call, 
and as he never posed he presented to my considera- 
tion his usual shy, sulk}', smiling, diffident, engaging 
manner. 

I said, " Oh," and half offered him a chair. He 
looked at it ; then round the room ; then at me 
and remarked : " I thought you were a grave, 
mature man with a white beard/' 

I said, " Did you ? " 

That is all I remember of the conversation. 
George was never a great talker ; but he was a good 
listener. I see his slight figure now, slouching airily, 
making occasional drawling comments, and smiling. 
It is his smile I remember, his sunny, interior smile ; 
and his curly hair, and popularity. Everybody loved 
him. This is no figure of speech. Of all the men 
I have known George Warrington Steevens, scholar, 
journalist, man of letters, and war correspondent, 
was the best beloved, and the most respected. 

He left my room quietly — all his movements were 
slow and soft — and when he was gone, I paused to 
consider him. He was then twenty-four ; had 

T 273 



274 More Authors and I 

been for nearly a year a Fellow of Pembroke College, 
Oxford, and was about finishing the first period — 
the scholastic one — of his brief meteoric career. His 
record of medals, prizes, scholarships and honours at 
School and University was, I believe, unprecedented. 
In the memoir W. E. Henley wrote of him he quotes 
the list of his distinctions. They would fill this page : 
they began with the Sassoon Entrance Scholarship to 
the City of London School ; among them were the 
Classical Scholarship at Balliol College, Oxford, in 
1887 ; a First in Honours at the London University 
matriculation in 1889, ending with First Class in 
Final Classical School, Oxford, 1892, and his election 
to a Fellowship of Pembroke College, Oxford, in 
1893. He was known as " the Balliol prodigy." Of 
him it was written : " The mere quantity of his 
knowledge was astonishing ; his command over it 
was still more so. He had a Napoleonic faculty for 
instantaneous and complete concentration of his 
intellectual forces." 

Commenting on this Henley says : " That is most 
true. He was so complete a master of his equipment 
and his means alike, that, as another school friend 
has recorded, he wrote his * Monologues ' with a 
running pen, and scarce ever a reference to the 
authorities shelved at his back." 

That is so. I watched him writing one of them 
at midnight, in the rooms he shared with Harold 
Brown in the Temple. Which it was I forget — • 
Troilus, Xantippe, Brutus, Nero, Cicero, Alcibiades 
— whichever it was he wrote straight on, talking 
occasionally as he wrote, never referring to a book, and 
doing it with the same easy tolerance and apparent 



George W. Steevens 275 

indifference with which he wrote of a lion-comiquc, 
a debate in the House of Commons, or the scene 
on Epsom Downs while the Derby was being run. 

The transition from his scholastic career to journal- 
ism was quick. It came via Cambridge, whither he 
had gone to edit the Cambridge Observer. Oscar 
Browning detected a new hand — incisive and witty — 
in that undergraduate journal, sought it out, and 
recommended G. VV. Steevens to Henry Cust, 
editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, which was then 
just beginning under its new editor, and new pro- 
prietor, Mr. W. W. Astor, to startle London. 

Steevens was then, as Henley describes him, 
merely " a type of Young Oxford : a youth with a 
pince-nez and a soft hat and a turn for Ibsen and 
Zola and all manner of extremes." He was given 
a desk in the big editorial room of the Pall Mall 
Gazette, where from eight in the morning till noon, 
a few brilliant young men produced the leader, 
the Occasional Notes, and the smarter portions 
of the paper that were not covered by the news and 
other departments. 

Steevens quickly showed that he could write on 
anything, usually better than anyone else. He had 
an intense interest in life, with an extraordinary 
power of concentration on the matter in hand ; 
and nothing seemed to give him any trouble. With 
the same apparent ease he would turn out in a 
morning an exhaustive study of Great Britain's sea 
power as compared with other nations (his Naval 
Policy was published in 1896) and a couple of 
Occasional Notes — witty, irreverent, pointed — deal- 
ing with some fashion or folly of the day. 



276 More Authors and I 

Within a month he was the most valuable man in 
the office, and the most popular. He was true as 
steel under his languid, lackadaisical, sullen, shy, 
amused, sympathetic manner. He never talked of 
himself : he never boasted : whatever he wrote read 
as if it was being done for the first time ; as if a new 
tale was being told. 

He was sent to report a debate in the House of 
Commons. His account was so direct, under- 
standing and amusing that the paper received 
letters by every post asking who was the new writer. 
He was influenced neither by praise nor blame : his 
delight was in doing what he had to do as well as 
he could. It was his way to drop into my room, 
on the Pall Mall Budget side of the corridor, when 
the Gazette had gone to press, and once I said to 
him : " George, what would you best like to do in 
life, if you were given the opportunity ? " 

He answered, " Just to go on as we're going now." 

That was not to be. An upheaval was looming 
ahead. In 1895, by one of those dramatic changes, 
common in journalism, Henry Cust went out from 
the Pall Mall Gazette and others came in. George 
Steevens, by this time, was writing regularly for 
Ihe National Observer^ for Blackwood? s Magazine 
and the New Review — such articles as " Mr. Balfour's 
Philosophy," and " From the New Gibbon " : his 
pen was eagerly sought by other editors : he stood 
forth as showing that high classical attainments and 
a full mind are no bar to great success in the burr and 
tumble of journalism. But all Oxford dons are not 
like G. W. Steevens. 

There was one editor, the cleverest editor- 



George W. Steevens 277 

proprietor, and business journalist of the day, who 
had watched his career, and who, when he was free, 
seized him, made him his chief writer, and became 
his friend, as everyone else did. That was Alfred 
Harmsworth. 

In 1896 The Daily Mail was founded : in 1897 
George W. Steevens joined the staff as star descrip- 
tive writer and war correspondent, and I believe 
that the success of that journal was due in a great 
measure to Steevens. That was his third period : 
then it was that he truly found himself. His 
articles appeared on the editorial page : those crisp, 
bright essays, telling without superfluous words, with 
understanding and with humour, just what that alert 
brain and responsive heart saw and felt, were a new 
thing in journalism. There has been none since like 
him. I read his articles day by day in The Daily 
Mail, and I have gone through them since in 
book form — With the Conquering Turk, Egypt in 
1898, With Kitchener to Khartum, The Tragedy of 
Drexfus, In India, The Land of the Dollar, Glimpses 
of Three Nations, From Capetown to Lady smith — and 
1 can only say once again that no one I know has 
equalled his vivid restraint, and power of grasping a 
new movement or a new country (new to him) and 
telling us about it freshly, vigorously, weightily yet 
lightly. 

Read his chapters on Kitchener, on the Kaiser, on 
Dreyfus and on Bryan. And read the last words he 
wrote when besieged in Ladysmith in 1900. He was 
thirty-one years of age when he passed away in that 
lonely, harassed South African town, thinking of a 
little grey island in the North Sea where his heart was, 



278 More Authors and I 

of an old house, surrounded by an old wall, whither 
he would hasten when he returned from his far and 
many journeyings. 

That old house, surrounded by an old wall, was 
Merton Abbey, near Wimbledon where, in former 
days, Nelson lived. That was his home after he 
had married Mrs. Rogerson. Thither we, his 
friends, would troop when the word went round 
that George was back; and there we would find 
him on the lawn on Sunday afternoons, unchanged 
in all the essentials that made George Warrington 
Steevens what he was. 

" To realize George Steevens," said Henley, " you 
must put away everything but simplicity, kindness, 
sincerity." 

Much has happened since then — the Great War 
among other things — but to me the memory of 
George Steevens is fresh and untarnished, and I say 
of him, as I said of Henry Cust, his chief, editor — 
Viva adhuc et desiderio pulcriora — Living still, and 
the more beautiful because of our longing. 






XLVII. J. M. SYNGE 

OFTEN have I promised myself to write about 
John M. Synge (i 871 -1909) — that rugged, 
lonely, black-visaged, silent Irishman, who 
cared nothing about politics, only for life, real life, 
the life of the imagination, and the life of his people 
of Aran and Wicklow, their dreams, tales, legends 
and ways. 

To Synge the word genius can be rightly 
applied. 

I delayed writing about him until I could go 
carefully through the four volumes of his Collected 
Works — his six plays, one unfinished ; his poems, 
and translations from Petrarch ; his books on the 
Aran Islands, and the Vagrants of Wicklow, and all 
that has been written about him by such close 
friends and admirers as Lady Gregory, W. B. Yeats 
and John Masefield. 

The legend of Synge is complete. His work and 
life are rounded oft, recorded. He stands out as an 
example to all authors : his brief life proclaims 
that to write vitally an imaginative writer must go, 
not to books, but to the source, to nature, to human 
nature. 

Synge obtained all his material from living with 
the peasants of the Aran islands, and Wicklow. He 
talked with them, he listened to their tales, such tales, 
such wild, wan and weird beliefs, so superstitious, so 

279 



280 More Authors and I 

beyond credibility to the sophisticated dweller in 
cities who could hardly believe them, their pathos 
and rampant humour, had not other Irish writers, 
notably Lady Gregory, also heard them and written 
them down. But these tales passed through the 
purifying fire of Synge's imagination, and came out 
gold (so Shakespeare worked), shaped and fashioned 
into the quick, yeasty, mysterious dialogue of his 
plays. Turn to any of them — to In the Shadow of 
the Glen, Riders to the Sea, The Well of the Saints, 
The Tinker's Wedding, The Playboy of the Western 
World, Deirdre of the Sorrows — turn to any page of 
these plays, and you are startled by the even fresh- 
ness, originality, and idiomatic flavour of the dialogue 
on each and every page. 

Synge's life may be divided into two parts — 
before he met W. B. Yeats in Paris in 1899, and 
after. It was Yeats who, with the instinct and 
intuition of a true poet, told Synge in Paris that 
he was sailing on the wrong tack ; that he should 
flee from foreign culture, fine and filling though it 
might be ; that he should return to Ireland, re- 
capture the Irish view-point and dream that he had 
held as a youth ; that he should aim " to express a 
life that has never found expression," and write 
plays for the Irish Literary Theatre, which Yeats 
was then meditating. The mystic has a practical 
side. Yeats' instinct that Synge was the dramatist 
(even if some of the Irish objected to him) for the 
Irish Literary Theatre was abundantly fulfilled. 
Synge obeyed. He returned to Ireland, and went 
year after year to Aran — to Inishmaan and Aranmor, 
" the islets that are separated from Connemara by 



J. M. Synge 281 

racing seas." There he garnered material for his 

plays and bool 

But I do not think chat the studious, aloof, 
sufficient-unto-himself Synge was unhappy in the 
Before period. Born near Dublin of an old Wicklow 
i.imily, he was educated at Trinity College, Dublin ; 
learnt the piano, flute and violin ; thought about 
becoming a musician ; went to Germany ; tramped 
the Continent on " forty pounds a year," so runs the 
phrase ; read hard, perused books in six languages, 
Hebrew, Irish, German, Italian, French, and English 
(so says John Masefield), made a deep study of 
Racine, his favourite author, and was dipping deeper 
and deeper into European culture when W. B. 
Yeats found him that day in Paris in 1899, and 
switched him off to Ireland. Which was good for 
Synge and good for the world. 

I saw him once — a brief glimpse. It was when 
the Abbey Theatre Company visited London, in 
the early summer of 1907, and gave performances, 
among other plays, of Synge's Riders to the Sea and 
The Playboy of the Western World. Throughout 
one of the acts, in the darkened house, Yeats and 
Synge stood in front of the stage box (the house was 
full) watching the performance. They never spoke 
to each other. They were the quietest couple in 
the theatre. I suppose by that time they had said 
all they had to say to each other about Celtic 
glamour, and Deirdre, and Cuchulain, and Fion, and 
Yeats, and Synge, and the United Irish-American 
Societies of New York, and the cheapest way of 
getting to the Aran Islands from Bloomsbury. 
.. I saw Synge that afternoon just as he looks in the 



282 More Authors and I 

frontispiece to John Masefield's A Few Personal 
Recollections of John M. Synge, the shock of thick 
black hair, the heavy black moustache, and the dark, 
grave face, gravely scrutinizing the darkened house 
and the bare stage where the Playboy was dancing 
to the Synge wild tune. Later I was to read what 
Yeats said about him in The Cutting of an Agate : 
" He was a solitary, undemonstrative man, never 
asking pity, nor complaining, nor seeking sympathy, 
but in this book's (Deirdre of the Sorrows) momentary 
cries : all folded up in brooding intellect, knowing 
nothing of new books and newspapers, reading the 
great masters alone ; and he was but the more hated 
because he gave his country what it needed, an 
unmoved mind. ... In Ireland he loved only 
what was wild in its people, and in ' the grey and 
wintry sides of many glens.' . . . He loved all 
that has edge, all that is salt in the mouth, all that 
is rough to the hand. . . . He had no life outside 
his imagination, little interest in anything that was 
not its chosen subject. He hardly seemed aware of 
the existence of other writers. . . . He was a 
drifting silent man, full of hidden passion, and loved 
wild islands because there, set out in the light of 
day, he saw what lay hidden in himself." 

It is impossible to describe, to those who have 
not seen one, the effect of a Synge play. I under- 
stand the language, but I am watching scenes, 
hearing talk, listening to vagaries that seem to 
belong to another people — and to another age ; 
and it all passes to an accompaniment of violence, 
and tenderness, and superstition, and insight, and 
unnatural humour, and unexpected wisdom : and 



J. M. Synge 283 

all is said in the racy idiom that is never absent from 
Synce. 

The hostile reception given to The Pi the 

Western World by the Irish in Dublin, New York 
and elsewhere hurt Synge. In London it was 
listened to with rapt attention, and greeted with 
loud applause. Why should the Irish object ? 
Lord Dundreary did not anger practical England, 
Sentimental Tommy did not outrage dour Scotland. 
Of The Playboy of the Western World Synge wrote, 
u Anybody who has lived in real intimacy with the 
Irish peasantry will know that the wildest sayings in 
this play are tame indeed compared with the fancies 
one may hear at any little hillside cottage of Geesala, 
or Carraroe, or Dingle Bay." 

It is interesting to contrast Synge's book on The 
Aran Islands with Gissing's By the Ionian Sea — 
Gissing stretching his longing gaze toward the past, 
Synge interested only, and fiercely, in the people of 
the present. In The Aran Islands may be found the 
material he used so wonderfully in his plays — " Pat 
has told me a story of the goose that lays the golden 
eggs." This was one of the " hearth " tales. An 
Irishwoman said to Lady Gregory, " My old nurse 
has been reading The Shadow of the Glen, but she 
says it is but a hearth tale ; she had heard it long ago 
in Ireland." 

His few poems are rugged and real. There is one 
that he calls Prelude. 

" Still south I went and west and south again, 

Through Wicklow from the morning till the night, 
And far from cities, and the sights of men, 

Lived with the sunshine and the moon's delight. 



284 More Authors and I 

I knew the stars, the flowers, and the birds, 
The grey and wintry sides of many glens, 

And did but half remember human words, 

In converse with the mountains, moors and fens." 

He took no interest in politics, he showed no con- 
cern with people in the mass, but he was " wise in 
judging individual men." And he said once to 
Yeats, " We must unite asceticism, stoicism, ecstasy ; 
two of these have often come together, but not all 
three." 

I think that they came together — often — in 
John M. Synge. 



XLVIII. SIR RABINDRANATH 
TAGORE 

SIR RABINDRANATH TAGORE is an author 
about whom I have not quite made up my 
mind. As a politician, frankly, I do not 
like him. 

He is, and has been for years, in England and 
America, a picturesque figure, passing softly through 
cities counselling Quietism and interpreting India, 
the India that we know through Max Mulleins 
Six Systems of Indian Philosophy, through a poem or 
two by Emerson, especially " Brahma," through 
Matthew Arnold's " Obermann Once More," and 
through Kipling in Kim, of course, and in that 
wonder-story, The Miracle of Pur an Bhagat. A 
London hostess gave days of diplomacy trying to 
bring Kipling and Tagore together at her dinner- 
table. She failed. Kipling and Tagore have the 
wisdom of the wise. And there are editors who, 
in the dream lists of a perfect issue, that they some- 
times compile, include an article by Kipling on 
Tagore, and one by Tagore on Kipling. 

He is not an author, I think, that casual readers 
peruse steadfastly : they are content with remem- 
bering a passage or two of the kC Things Felt," or 
" Things Perceived," or "Things Half-Realized," 
that are collected in his Gitanjali or So?ig Offerings, 
which won the Nobel prize in 191 3. Stray Birds 

285 



286 More Authors and I 

is another collection of Tagoreisms. By the by, he 
has at least one disciple who peruses him steadfastly, 
for in the public library copy of Stray Birds, which I 
have been looking through, I find that a reader has 
inscribed on the first page, " Read this slowly to 
appreciate " ; and on the last page he has written — 
" Read over again to appreciate." This annoying 
and iniquitous person has also ticked with a pencil 
the Tagore prose poems that he especially likes. One 
to which he has given an extra thick tick of approval 
is this : " The prelude of the night is commenced 
in the music of the sunset, in its solemn hymn to the 
ineffable dark." I submit that the man or woman 
who ticked this is a duffer. There is nothing in it. 
But he ticks another which is fine, and thought- 
starting : " Men are cruel, but man is kind." 

It is but fair to remark that these Tagore prose 
poems have been translated by him, or by others, 
from the Bengali : thereby they lose whatever they 
have of rhythm and melody. I do not think that 
prose poems or spiritual apophthegms are very 
difficult to construct, especially if one makes a life- 
work of them as Tagore has done. Some of his are 
fine. Years ago I read one by Tagore which has 
remained with me : 

" Why did the lamp go out ? 
I shaded it with my cloak to save it from the wind, that is 
why the lamp went out." 

From " The Gardener." 

Tagore's prose poems have crept into the antho- 
logies. The Poet Laureate has included three in 
The Spirit of Man. I am not much impressed by 



Sir Rabindranath Tagore 287 

the following : " . . . Things that I longed for in 
vain and things I got — let them pass. Let me truly 
possess the things that I ever spurned and over- 
looked.'' 

Until a certain afternoon in New York I had never 
seen Rabindranath Tagore. If I ever framed a 
mental picture of him he was but another of the soft- 
footed, soft-voiced Swami clan who glide from 
India to tell an obdurate Western world of their 
ages-old faith, and who dodge hostesses, ever on the 
look-out for lions, indifferent whether they roar 
or whisper, so long as they are lions. An actual 
picture I had of him in William Rothenstein's 
drawing, with straggly hair, curling beard, downcast 
eyes, and a long, pale, thin face ; he is seated on the 
ground contemplating nothing visible. And of 
course I had seen photographs of him. He is not 
averse to being photographed for the decoration of 
his books : Tagore at Riverside, Tagore at Santa 
Barbara, Tagore at Salt Lake City, and so on. 
And I had read in the papers the purpose of his 
latest visit to America, which was to collect funds 
and to arouse interest in a university he wishes to 
found in India where Indian lore and philosophy 
will be taught, with exchange professors proceeding 
from America and England. A modest beginning 
has already been made at Bolpur, about 100 miles 
north-west of Calcutta. Admirers of Tagore will 
remember that the uniform series of his works is 
called " The New Bolpur Edition." 

After all this preparation I approach the moment 
when I saw Tagore. He was advertised to lecture 
at the Park Theatre, New York, at 2.30 on " The 



288 More Authors and I 

Meeting of the East and West." It was a wet, cold 
afternoon, the kind of day when people of leisure 
prefer to stay by their radiators. I arrived at 2.28 
prepared to advance to the box office with my usual 
formula : " One seat, on the aisle, please, near the 
stage as possible." But I found the vestibule in a 
hubbub, blocked with flushed women and girls, and 
two or three business men amazed to find themselves 
at a matinee. At the box office a voice said to me, 
" Tickets all sold : stay, I can give you one in the 
twelfth row of the balcony.' 7 

I wedged my way into the seat, and there I sat 
hemmed in, very cross, and saying to myself, " Be 
just to Tagore. It isn't his fault that he is popular 
with the ladies, and that you have a bad seat." I 
did not feel any better when the curtain rose dis- 
closing a Broadway baronial hall, rather dim and 
rather fusty. Near the footlights was a table and 
on the o. p. side of it stood a painted parchment 
cylindrical lamp about two feet high. Behind this 
was another table, and on the p. side stood another 
painted parchment cylindrical lamp, larger, about 
four feet high. 

Mine eyes dazzled, and I said aloud, " I don't like 
it." The lady on my o. p. side murmured, " Evi- 
dently, it's Indian symbolism." 

" Nonsense," I cried. " You can buy those lamps 
on Fifth Avenue." 

" Hush, hush ! " cried all the contiguous ladies, 
" hush ! " 

The lights in the theatre went down, you could 
have heard a fan wave, as from a door at the back of 
the baronial hall emerged a gentleman in a tail coat, 



Sir Rabindranath Tagore 289 

the typical Introducer; but nobody troubled about 

him. It was his attitude \vc watched — his inclined 
head, his shrinking into the shade of the oriel 
window, just as the members of a Cabinet act when 
a President or a Prime Minister enters the room. 
When the Introducer was well out of the way in the 
oriel window inclosure, and his head and shoulders 
had attained their lowest droop, Tagore glided into 
the painted parchment cylindrical illumination, and 
stood erect and still, like a time-worn pillar, between 
the two lamps. He is over six feet tall, and he was 
clad in a dusky-red garment, falling from neck to 
feet. We call it in provincial cities of England 
and America a dressing-gown ; but in India I have 
no doubt that it is the correct costume for Sir 
Rabindranath Tagore, Kt., cr. 1 91 5 ; D.Lit. Calcutta 
Univ., to wear. 

There he stood, illumined from behind and 
before, detached, remote (oh, so remote !), just as he 
looked (without the lighting) at the Yale-Princeton 
football match, which he found " unrestful." He 
did not move except to take from his toga a pamphlet 
with a blue cover, his lecture. This he held 
negligently, while the Introducer in a score or so of 
words, presented the Sage to the hushed audience. 

I heard him perfectly even from my distant seat. 
His voice, high-pitched, monotonously musical, has 
carrying power, and when he lapsed into Bengali 
I felt that I was by Ganges, not by Hudson. He, 
himself, was like an apparition : he addressed us 
and yet he ignored us : he meandered on, passion- 
less, plaintive, and when it was over he vanished 
silently from the baronial hall, ignoring us and the 



290 More Authors and I 

Introducer, who again stood with bent head 
shrinking into the shade of the oriel window. 

The matter of the lecture was all right, on the 
lines of the essays in his book called Sadhana, which 
I consider is Tagore's best production. He has 
been called the Maeterlinck of the East : it would 
be hard to write a poor book on such a fruitful 
subject as the philosophy of ancient India expressed 
in Matthew Arnold's — 

" The East bowed low before the blast 
In patient, deep disdain, 
She let the legions thunder past, 
And plunged in thought again." 

Another of Tagore's good books is his translation 
of the songs of fifteenth-century Kabir, who strikes 
me as a greater poet than Tagore. If I may so 
express it, there is more " bite " in Kabir, and more 
real profundity. 

Tagore's most popular book is his Gitanjali or 
Song Offerings. It has an amazing introduction by 
W. B. Yeats, who says, " These prose translations 
from Rabindranath Tagore have stirred my blood as 
nothing has for years." I have given up trying to 
account for what an Irish poet will say and do. As 
to Tagore's plays, The Post Office and Sacrifice, 
which have been received with polite respect in 
London, I suspend judgment. 

It is my custom when writing around an author to 
inflict questions upon my friends. " What do you 
think of Tagore ? " I asked an artist. 

He ruminated a minute, then answered, " I met 
him once in a country house. He was the most 



Sir Rabindranath Tagore 291 

silent, ascetic chap I have ever come in contact with. 
He would sit for hours on a divan in the back hall 
lost in contemplation. He got on my nerves. My 
hostess told me that he was a great man. I never 
doubted it until you began talking about him." 



XLIX. A. B. WALKLEY 

1 TURNED my back on Niagara Falls and opened 
Playhouse Impressions by A. B. Walkley at the 
chapter headed " Hedda Gabler, Vaudeville 
Theatre, London, April, 1891." 

The rhythmic thunder of the Falls is not un- 
pleasant, but I did not want to look at the cascade 
longer. I preferred A. B. Walkley. At that choice 
I smiled. The contrast between A. B. W. and 
Niagara Falls is so sufficient. It was quite easy to 
ignore the Falls. All I did was to turn round my 
rocker on the hotel balcony, compose myself snugly, 
and read what one of the acutest, subtlest, and most 
amusingly cynical, and least idealistic of modern 
minds thought about Ibsen and the world in 1891. 
A. B. W. thinks the same to-day, I am sure. Such 
minds do not change. They become more sensitive 
and more perceptive ; but they run on the old rails. 
They do not diverge into side-tracks ; they never 
soar into the empyrean; but being compact and 
allusive, and intensely interested in mental im- 
pressions of the moment, they have neat and ardent 
communications for the trained reader. 

Do you blame me for preferring Arthur Bingham 
Walkley to the famous Falls ? I had already done 
my duty to them. Clad in oilskins I had gone under 
them, looked down upon them, been sprayed foy 
them, and had stood on the deck of the Maid of the 

292 



A. B. Walkley 293 

Mist, while she thrust her audacious nose almost 
into the cascade, staying there some minutes panting, 
as if saying : " You're big, and you make a lot of 
noise, but I'm not afraid of you." 

Moreover, fixing my eyes on a book instead of 
directing them to the Falls pleased me because it 
was stolen reading. In such reading I delight. 

A book is never so interesting as when snatching 
at a passage in the midst of other claims. 

I had brought Playhouse Impressions with me on 
this journey to stud}- it carefully. Reading an 
article by this author in the London Times on 
" Coterie Criticism," quoted by the New York 
Times, I was moved to write about A. B. W. So 
when the hour came to take that wonderful tram-car 
ride down the edge of the gorge to Queenston I 
carried the book with me ; and I withdrew my eyes 
from the rapids and the whirlpool on one side, and, 
on the other, the most fertile fruit-belt in the 
Province, to read this : 

" Literary criticism is not some dominie business 
of assigning good and bad marks, but the art of 
enjoying masterpieces. " 

Embarking on the boat for Toronto I was more 
concerned about not losing Playhouse Impressions 
than about my luggage. During that three hours' 
steam across Lake Ontario I divided my attention 
equally between the vast, still, reposeful waters and 
Mr. Walkley's alert, quick, unreposeful prose. I 
was not concerned either to agree or disagree with 
this witty, wilful, worldly author. I read him for 
the pleasure of perusing his polite, personal adven- 
tures among masterpieces. From Hedda Gabler I 



294 More Authors and I 

turned to Rosmersholm, a play, I remember, that 
moved me very much when I first saw it on the stage. 
Was Mr. Walkley moved ? Here is the comment of 
that " eclectic dilettante," A. B. W. — 

" All this is very piquant, bizarre, fresh, of ab- 
sorbing interest to the serious spectator, and to the 
more eclectic dilettante (say the Des Essarts of M. 
Huysmans), at least as fascinating as a Japanese curio 
or the rare edition (uncut) of the Fastis sier Francoys" 

There you have the author of Playhouse Im- 
pressions at his best and at his worst. But what a 
triumph is his — to make me read, word for word, 
a book all about thirty-year-old plays and play- 
wrights. I reflected upon this as the boat steamed 
across the lake ; as the lights of Toronto grew 
brighter, beneath the moon and a sky of stars. 

Why, you may ask, focus on a book thirty years 
old ? Because it is essential Walkley. He has 
published other volumes — Frames of Mind, 1 899 ; 
Dramatic Criticism, 1903 ; Drama and Life, 1907. 
Although these volumes are extremely readable 
(everything he writes is that) they do not add any- 
thing to the amiable and witty man-of-the-worldism 
of Playhouse Impressions. 

Moreover, I suspect that I have read most of the 
essays contained in those books in The Times of 
London. For years he has been the dramatic critic 
of that great journal, and it is no exaggeration to say 
that he has made numbers of people read his dramatic 
criticism who never enter a theatre. His articles 
delight me : they are so well-shaped, and so well- 
written, and they always say something to the point 
and wittily; but I doubt ifjmanagers and actors 



A. B. Walkley 295 

like them as well as the cultured public. He never 
praises when he should not praise, and he never 
writes " quotes,'' that is, sentences of uproarious 
appreciation that can be used in advertisements. 

He is a scholar who is not afraid to play journal- 
istically with his scholarship. He is the one dramatic 
critic who constantly refers to Aristotle, and 
occasionally to Plato and others. His knowledge of 
French and French dramatic history has no bounds. 
His master in the kind of dramatic criticism that he 
has introduced into England is Jules Lemaitre. In 
the prefatory note to Playhouse Impressions he 
writes — 

" I make no apology for the frequency with which 
that most brilliant of contemporary critics is cited 
in this volume. My only fear (for I cannot pretend 
to estimate in my own case the full extent of his 
influence) is lest I have not cited him often enough." 

Latterly A. B. W. has been w r riting in The Times, 
column essays on subjects outside the theatre. These 
essays have a signal merit. They are always witty, 
always readable, and they never contain a superfluous 
word, if you except recondite allusions and un- 
hackneyed French phrases, which he loves. 

A. B. VV. leads a double life. The division is 
quite proper ; but a division it is. He gives his days 
to official life (he may have retired, now) and his 
nights to the theatre. 

I know him in his theatrical environment. At 
7.30, on the first night of a new play, often have I 
seen him dining at a certain club, usually with the 
same set of cronies. He is a short, dapper man, 
something of a dandy, at any rate extremely neat, 



296 More Authors and I 

and up-to-date in his appearance. He is quiet in Lis 
manner, with an interior, somewhat bored smile, far 
removed from Theodore Roosevelt's jovial laugh. 
And I am sure that he never uses the word " bully." 

Officially A. B. W. is, or was, assistant secretary to 
the General Post Office, and a person of importance 
in St. Martin's le Grand. He entered the depart- 
ment in 1877, and from the way he has risen, it is 
plain that being a disciple of Jules Lemaitre does not 
hinder one from efficiency in a government office. 
He was secretary to the British delegation at the 
Washington Postal Congress of 1897, and he has 
performed other important postal duties throughout 
the world. Once the light of publicity flashed 
upon his double life. That was when a well-known 
Publicist complained (with his tongue in his cheek) 
that when he wrote to the General Post Office about 
the non-delivery of a letter, he received an official 
answer from the dramatic critic of The Times. 

He has also seen himself on the stage. That was 
in the delightful comedy by George Bernard Shaw 
called Fanny's First Flay. We who were present 
on the first night were delighted to find that the 
actor who played Trotter, one of the four dramatic 
critics in the play, was made up to resemble Mr. 
A. B. Walkley, and, even if the resemblance had not 
been perfect, the dialogue indicated A. B. W. at 
every point, even to his partiality for Aristotle. In 
the review of Fanny's First Flay in The Times the 
next morning Mr. Walkley treated the personality 
aloofly, allusively and quite in the Jules Lemaitre 
manner. When the play was published the incorri- 
gible Bernard Shaw announced that Mr. Trotter 



A. B. Walkley 297 

had forgiven him beforehand, and ha J 1 i I *d the 
actor in his make-up. 

It is pleasant for us ordinary people to watch 
such gambols ; and after all this excitement, it is 
a relief to learn from Who's Who that Mr. Walkle/s 
recreation is — gardening. 



L. ISRAEL ZANGWILL 

1KNEW him first as a humorist, that is, as the 
editor of Ariel, one of the many weekly, 
serio-comic journals that have tried to carve 
a slice of the popularity of Punch, or create a new 
public for the facetious, the ironic, and the pathetic. 
That was years ago. Ariel has long disappeared, and 
I have entirely forgotten the nature of its contents. 
But I clearly remember that Israel Zangwill was 
editor, and that the young, literary Bohemians of 
that day regarded him as a coming man, and quoted 
his paragraphs, storyettes, and jokes that appeared, 
I suppose, in Ariel. 

" I've never seen such black hair as he's got," 
said one of these literary Bohemians, many years ago, 
" or such energy. Of course he's a Jew, one of the 
best, and he's frightfully in earnest about his race. 
Odd, isn't it, that two Jews — he and Solomon, the 
painter, should be in the running for great success 
in literature and painting." 

No one will deny that Israel Zangwill has achieved 
great literary success, not unqualified, for it took him 
some time to realize, and he does not quite realize 
it yet, that his gift to the world lies in his interpre- 
tations of his own race and their ideals ; and his own 
large ideals worked out in his plays, and in such 
small, but significant books as the reprint of his 
lecture on The Principle of Nationalities. 

298 



Israel Zangwill 299 

I admit that he is a humorist, but humour is a 
branch of the Zangwill tree, not the tree itself. 
He it was who called Izaak Walton " The Judicious 
Hooker." That alone calls him to a niche in the 
Temple of Humour. 

But in the Ariel days, before and after those lively 
times, it was as a kind of humorist that he strove to 
enter the literary fortress. Indeed, I believe that 
he was once included among the exponents of " the 
New Humour," and readers of his early books, The 
Premier and the Painter, 1888, The Bachelors'' Club, 
1 891, The Old Maids' Club, 1892, may recall that in 
those volumes there are consistent attempts at 
facetious expression. 

Recently I have re-read two of his later novels — 
The Master, published in 1895, and The Mantle of 
Elijah in 1900. I read them as a duty : as a pleasure 
I would never have reached the last page of either 
of them. The narratives do not hold me, and I feel 
that, an fond, he is really as much of a stranger to 
the characters as his readers are. He is out of his 
element in writing about a Prime Minister, a 
Great Painter, and a Lady of Breeding. Yet I 
once knew a man who raved about The Master. I 
find it intolerably long, and the final analysis of the 
Great Painter and the description of his pictures is 
merely sentimental. 

With Jinny the Carrier, Mr. Zangwill broke a 
novel-writing silence of more than twenty years, 
and I, whose time is fully occupied, hesitate to begin 
this conscientious tale, which is twice as long as the 
ordinary novel, and w 7 hich moves slowly in an 
Essex village in the leisurely days of the middle 



300 More Authors and I 

nineteenth century. Mr. Zangwill likes tortoise 
novels. I do not. I prefer the method of Miss Zona 
Gale in Miss Lulu Butt. 

At this point the reader may say : " Well, if 
you do not like his novels and his semi-humorous 
books, why write about Israel Zangwill ? " Well, 
recently, he was brought vividly to my mind through 
reading a very remarkable article by the Rev. 
Samuel W. Purvis on " The Jew in History." When 
I had finished it, I sat back in my chair, and recalled 
my debt to Israel Zangwill for his interpretations of 
the Jewish people. Those books—Children of the 
Ghetto, Ghetto Tragedies, Ghetto Comedies, and 
above all Dreamers of the Ghetto — are the real 
work of his life. In them he moves spaciously, 
with love and insight : in them I feel that he is 
writing from his heart, not from his head, as in the 
novels. 

This versatile Jewish man of letters, son of Moses 
Zangwill, who settled in England in 1 848 ; who is 
self-educated ; who, through his own efforts, climbed 
the educational ladder and became B.A. of London ; 
who is now President of the International Jewish 
Territorial Organization, wrote in Dreamers of the 
Ghetto a book that must always remain a noble and 
intimate record of a great race — a prose poem. I 
have preserved what Henley wrote about Dreamers 
of the Ghetto. He said : " Here, I take it — here, so 
it seems to me — is that rarest of rare things, a book. 
As I have said, I do not wholly believe in it. But it 
is a book ! It goes far to explain the Jew. It is, 
in fact, a Jew of something akin to genius upon 
Jewry — the unchangeable quantity. And I feel that 



Israel Zangwill 301 

the reading of it has widened my horizon, and give □ 
me much to perpend." 

Of his plays some of them are in the category of 
his semi-humorous novels ; but the three that count 
arc The Melting Pot, The Wat God and The Next 
Religion. To these I may add The Cock-Pit. The 
Religion was forbidden public representa- 
tion by the British censor, one of those acts that 
bring the office of the Lord Chamberlain, which 
licenses plays, into ridicule. As Mr. Zangwill justly 
observes in the Preface to the printed edition of 
the play — " The notion that the susceptibilities of 
any particular sect have to be protected by the State 
is opposed to the constitutional right of free speech, 
and seems to rest on an assumption that those likely 
to be offended are driven into the theatre as the Jews 
of the Roman Ghetto were driven into the church to 
be shocked by sermons." 

Happily The Melting Pot can be freely acted. It 
is almost a great play ; perhaps it is a great pla 
have seen it performed, and I have read, and re-read 
it ; particularly the Appendices, and the Afterword, 
that interest me as much as the play itself. I have 
an idea that if Mr. Zangwill were to take The Melting 
Pot in hand again, prune it, simplify it, and develop 
its vital parts, The Melting Pot, like Drinkwater's 
Abraham Lincoln, might be shaped into a play that 
will always hold the boards in America from one 
year's end to another. 

His fertile pen has run easily into many fields, for 
he has much to say, so much, that he does not pay 
such close attention, as he might, to the manner of 
saying it. There is Without Prejudice, good journalism 



302 More Authors and I 

from the Pall Mall Magazine and other quarters ; 
there is Italian Fantasies, good travel writing ; there 
is The War for the World, good militant, arm-chair 
war-talk ; there is his book of Poems — good verses. 
These are all above the average. But it is by 
Dreamers of the Ghetto and The Melting Pot that he 
will live : these are essential Zangwill, the tree itself, 
not a branch. 



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